My wife has a G4 tower that was purchased when they first came out, baybe 5 years ago. It still works fine.
Our bank, however, now demands a newer version of Quicken to download banking info, and the newest version of Mac Quicken will not run on OS 10.1 (which is what she has).
Apparently OS upgrades of this magnitude are not available to download, and when I called up last week to see what we needed was told to wait a couple of days to get the new Jaguar, otherwise known as OS 10.4.
I’m now glad I didn’t just order it over the phone, because when I went to the Mac store to buy it I discovered that despite my conversation with the Mac tech the week before who said our copmuter would be able to run it, we apparently do not have enough memory (only 128K when it needs 256K).
So we need more memory as well as the new OS, and the Mac store I went to says that this is an “old” Mac with expensive memory. They only had 512 available to buy, and it cost $200.
The guy suggested I go with a Mini-Mac instead, for $499 (instead of the $329 for the memory and new OS). It would have more memory than her ciurrent Mac, more hard drive space and a faster processor. We are tempted to do this, except I’m not sure about the software.
They said they would transfer all date we wanted (for free) from the old Mac to the new Mini-Mac, and we would have new versions of most of the software we need. I think he said it even comes with Quicken, and with AOL that my wife uses.
But it doesn’t come with Word. My wife uses Word quite a bit. A new version from the Mac store will cost $400, which pushes the Mini-Mac beyond the upgrade cost-effectiveness. An upgrade of Word is “only” $230, but still. The guy told me, however, that copying the Word application to the new Mini-Mac will still run (since it runs just fine on her current OS 10.1).
Is this true?
I know on PC’s, which I am more familiar with, that this would generally not be true. It would need to be installed on a new computer. But will the application file of Word (Word '97, I think, if it matters) run on the new Mini-Mac just by copying it on the new drive?
Are there any other issues I need to consider before doing this?
I am scheduled to drop the computer off first thing tomorrow morning, so not much time to get feedback.
My wife would also like Acrobat Reader and Flash Player to play properly, which do not on her current computer. Am I correct in thinking that a new Mini-Mac would easily solve those issues just by downloading the respective programs?
Anything else I should know about?