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I dont have enough free memory to run PhotoShop CS. I'm looking into external drives to free up space. I would also like to upgrade OS so I can watch netflix, and maybe would help with streaming video in general. If I upgrade, not sure what to upgrade to as I want to still be able to use PS CS, office X.1, amd maybe dreamweaver MX (less important) since I already have have these and there would be no cost. Any suggestions are much, much appreciated. I don't know many tech terms beyond CPU, HD, Platform, etc. I am not very technical.I did upgrade the CPU myself thanks to youttube but not sure what the speed is now. All I know is I upgraded to the "maximum".

Thank You for any help! Hard to type with the delay on this page, forgive typos!

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If you go to the Apple Menu > About This Mac, it will tell you your CPU speed, RAM size, and Mac OS version. If you select your hard drive on the desktop and press Command-I, it will say the hard drive size and free space. Can you post these five numbers? – CajunLuke Apr 5 '11 at 20:16
1.42 GHz PowerPC G4. Not sure if that means it's intel or not. 1 GB SDRAM , as for hard drive size I don't have a Command button so I hope the following infor will work: Activity Monitor shows I have approx 67GB utilized with 7GB free. Running OS X 10.4.11. I Run a pet rescue so saving money was important and I purchased used equipment with old software and don't know much about it (also don't have a mac keyboard so I miss out on some things). I hope that's all the info you need. Please help, we all appreciate it! – user5053 Apr 6 '11 at 0:53
Thanks for the info - I'll have an answer soon. – CajunLuke Apr 6 '11 at 0:59

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General information before we get to the crux of the question: "PowerPC" means you're not on Intel. 7 gigs free hard drive space is getting close to insufficient, but I usually don't have problems until I get less than 4-5 gigs. You may want to get an external hard drive and move some of your data files over there to free up space.

At 1 gig of RAM, you should probably look into upgrading that. I would expect the machine would work with two gigs, more would be pushing it. iFixit has very complete instructions of how to disassemble and reassemble nearly all Macs.

Your processor speed is high enough that you can upgrade to Leopard (10.5), but that may not actually improve much for you. For starters, if you upgrade to Leopard, you will no longer be able to run programs in Classic (Mac OS 9). If this is important, don't upgrade the OS. Also, I doubt an OS upgrade will make it easier to run Netflix and other online videos, as that is more of a hardware thing: Netflix, for instance, requires an Intel Mac. (I just tried it on my iBook G4 1.33 GHz, a fairly similar machine to yours, running 10.5 and got the system requirements page instead of the video. Netflix requires Microsoft's Silverlight which requires an Intel processor, so that's never going to work.)

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