I had been thinking of getting a Mac mini to play with, but a friend of mine sold me this for £100. I haven’t used a Mac since I got rid of my Performa 6200 years ago. What do Mac Dopers recommend I do with it?
It has MacOs 10.4, 512Mb of RAM, 70Gb, an ATI Rage 128 Pro, a DVD-RAM and a Zip. I plugged it into my switchbox and everything worked flawlessly. I have various bits of junk lying around that will probably go into it - was thinking of swapping out the DVD-RAM for my old Plextor CDRW, and I think I have some compatible RAM somewhere.
Your suggestions for cheap/free software and improvements, please. In the meantime I am off to Ambrosia to download all their shareware games
That’s essentially the same computer I’ve got - minus some RAM and plus a Zip drive. It’s served me well for many years, and don’t plan to upgrade for at least a couple more. (Then again, I tend to wait to upgrade until ALL the cool new stuff won’t work on the old one)
I’d add RAM, but double check if the RAM you have is compatible. Macs are somewhat more picky about RAM.
What else you do to the computer depends on what you want to do. This computer is capable of running just about everything in Apple’s iLife suite (except for GarageBand, which gets bogged down very quickly.)
That’s just as well, since I have no musical talent whatsoever. Out of curiosity, how does iWeb compare to other web authoring packages, and is it easy to use with a webhost other than .mac?
My take on iWeb (which I did not have open for very long) is that, if you know about as much about website design as your great-grandmother did when she was your age, and you would like a web site to share pictures and start a blog, iWeb will set you up pretty quickly and when you are done you will still know about as much about website design as your great-grandmother did when she was your age.
It doesn’t feel very flexible, i.e., I’m not sure it’s even capable of doing a different thing with a web site, like, say, you wanted, oh I dunno, a long blabby overview of veterinary cardiac technique with lots of words and phrases linked to other folks’ pages. I’m probably wrong about that, but it sure felt like I was being immediately funnelled into the generation of a photo album plus a blog.
I detest HTML; I still launch PageMill under Classic [he confesses] when I need to create or edit a web page. With nothing but a text editor I could, on a good day, make something bold or italic* and maybe even get hard returns where I want them, but I’m not entirely sure I could manage a working link. So I ought to be the target audience for iWeb, but it immediately turned me off and made me feel badly patronized and insulted, so I trashed it and recovered oceans of hard drive space (man, that thing was huge!).
