Leopard, Tiger or Panther on a 667MHz, 1GB PowerBook G4

Firstly, heres my situation. I am a 17 year old student who just needs a fast reliable laptop which I can take around and do work on. I currently have Tiger installed and it runs fairly slowly, I am wondering if reinstalling it will solve my problem.
I have access to all OSX's and can borrow a external DVD drive to install them with. I am wondering which would be the most useful for my situation. Also, just wondering if Panther comes on a CD, so I don't have to borrow the external DVD Drive.
What are the advantages/disadvantages of each OSX. I realize Panther is the oldest and will probably run the fastest on this system, but I heard that Tiger was a great upgrade and still maintained the performance of Panther. And Leopard being the newest will probably be too much for my poor little PowerBook to handle, but will it run at all?
Also, how hard is it to get my hands on a processor upgrade for this? I wouldn't mind an upgrade to 1.5GHz or something similar. And how much would it cost?
Thanks in advance, Nick.

Hi, Ronin. Your Powerbook doesn't meet the minimum system requirements for Leopard, and although you can install it anyway, it would run slowly and monopolize much more of your limited RAM than Tiger or Panther. I still run Panther on my Tibook because Tiger offered exactly nothing that I found even vaguely interesting, never mind essential. The only thing that will get me to upgrade again on this machine is some killer app (or killer new version of an app I already have) that requires Tiger. I won't upgrade to Leopard until my next new Mac, and even then I'll have to keep this machine to run Classic on: I have a couple of old apps I couldn't live without and can't upgrade. So I suggest either installing Panther or reinstalling Tiger, after wiping your hard drive clean.
No processor upgrades are available for your model.
Message was edited by: eww

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