I was wondering if I upgraded to a combo drive and added some memory onto my PowerBook, could I upgrade to the new Leopard operating system and still have my computer work efficiently? I took it into a Mac store and the "genius" told me that it wasn't feasible, but the requirements on the side of the box indicate that with my G4 I should be able to run the new OS. I currently have 1 GHz processor and 768 MB DDR SDRAM. Please help. I don't want to have to purchase a new computer when I've had no trouble with this one and I LOVE it!

Your machine is definitely towards the bottom of the requirements so it will run slow no matter what, but it is possible.

That's what the guy at the Apple store said. I've been reading horror stories about people installing OS 10.4.9 with crashes and other weird things happening, but they all seemed to have MacBooks or iMacs. I don't know if that means anything. I just need to be able to install Office 2008 on my computer and the system requirement is OS 10.4.9 or higher and I figured why not update to the latest OS. Any suggestions? I really need some guidance here. As I said earlier, I don't really want to purchase a new computer just yet, as mine is working like a charm and the guy at the Apple store said I should be able to get at least another 3 years out of it.

I would stick with 10.4, it runs a lot faster on your machine than Leopard would. If you need to run Leopard, you really should get a new machine first.

So, you don't think I should bother upgrading my processor or anything like that? If not, I guess I will purchase Tiger, upgrade to the most recent version online, purchase Office 2004, and perform the XML upgrade to be able to open and read the new docx, etc files. Does this sound like it should work?

Though Leopard offers more crossplatform and intel program compatibility, Tiger is by far the better OS. Leopard is riddled with security breaches and doesn't offer much more as far as processing. Upgrade your ibook to the faster hard drive and CD drive. They are great little machine and will last hella longer than any new Mac laptop.