A Mac G4 Client with KIP v11

It seemed such a shame that migrating to KIP version 11 Multiuser would force us to upgrade any Mac G4 computers currently in use with KIP version 10.3, so we decided to test one out.

Our first test was an eMac running a 1.42 GHz G4 processor loaded with 512 MB of RAM and Mac OS 10.4.11, and here are the results.

Awesome!

The G4 ran flawlessly. In fact, and we are not sure why, this G4 seemed just as fast as our 1.8 GHz iMac G5 running the same OS loaded with 2 GB RAM.

And the surprising thing was that the 512 MB of RAM did not seem to affect performance at all.

Granted, we did not test every routine in KIP, but whatever we did run, ran well.

So, we are modifying our hardware requirements to include G4 Macs.

For sure, you will need a minimum of Mac OS 10.4.11 and 512 MB of RAM. Earlier versions of Mac OS 10.4 definitely do not work.

You can try slower G4 Macs and test whether the performance is acceptable to you or not. Obviously, expect a 700 MHz G4 to run half the speed of the 1.42 GHz G4 we tested.

But the good news is, the G4 is OK with KIP version 11.