Topic awaiting preservation: Mac for Mom

well I hate to admit but my mom can't handle PC....all this soviet era made her...err well, not so educated.
So now she wants to have her own computer and I think she should get mac for more enjoyable usage. I have very little expirience with mac so I turn to you guys for advice.
I was thinking that Super Drive will do. plus the only think is that she wants a printer, I wonder are all printers of any brand compatable with mac?

well please help me out here..

Yeah, the superdrive pretty much covers everything. I can't veiw your link cause the session timed out. You can get an e-mac/iMac relatively cheap. My advice would be to stick with at least a G4 chip and go for lots of memory too. I think they still sell G4 towers too, they should be cheap now that the G5's are out. When I ordered my G4 years ago I had them put a zip250 in as well. That's nice for backing up and stuff because it's really quick and easy. The disks are exopensive compared to CD's though. I'm not even sure if they still offer zip drives as a custom add on come to think of it. Never had any trouble finding printers and such. Just check the box for system requirements or shop online.

Superdisks are ok, I had one on my machine for sometime. The only probem I have is trying to find local computer shops that carry the media anymore. I managed to find one disk on a clearance shelf yesterday but that the only one I have found is 6 months. I would suggest realy try to find a CD-R or Zip drive if you want removeable media.

J. Stuart J.

Ruski: Almost any printer is compatable with a mac. I have a G4 which is very good, and personally I have had good luck with Epson for a printer. That printer works well with old and the new operating system.

jstuartj - super disk and superdrive aren't refering to the same thing. The "superdrive" is the apple name for their cdr/cdrom/dvdr/dvdrom combo burner/reader. It reads just about any kind of disk media and writes to several formats. So getting a cdr would be redundant. FYI is all.

If you're getting a mac, make sure it's got the heft to handle osx. Aqua requires a REDICULOUSLY powerful video card just to run efficiently. You need a minimum of 32 megs just to render the os correctly, otherwise it's painfully slow. Granted most newer machines come with sufficient heft to deal with it, but it's something to keep in mind. Other than that, OSX and macs are pretty easy to use for most people. I would second the EPSON printers, I've been very happy with them. But osx pretty much supports anything you want to connect to it.

$0.02


It's only after we've lost everything...
That we're free to do anything...

Well that makes life confusing. Makes me wonder what you call a newer improved vesion of a drive that you called super to begin with. The Super Duper Drive or maybe the Super Fantastic Drive.

Thanks for the info, I have fallen little behind on my Mac knowledge, I guess I should pick up a few Mac mags or hit some mac websites to catch up on the new hardware. Not that my sucky G3 could run any of it.

J. Stuart J.

[This message has been edited by jstuartj (edited 11-04-2003).]

Jes so ya know, you can often get either an extra 256 MB of RAM, a printer, or a scanner for free with certain computer purchases from the MacConnection catalog (I dunno about their website.) Sometimes you can get better deals from those catalogs.

-Xel

Thank YOU!

Although the G4 is a much better chip, my last laptop (iBook 600 with 16mb vram) ran OS-X 10.2 quite well. So if money is an issue, you may want to consider a G3 iBook since the price on them has just dropped dramaticly due to the release of the G4 iBook. Then again, the flatpanel iMacs are very nice...

The G4 is the same chip as the G3, it's the daughter board, the altivec, that gives the G4 it's boost in speed; and that is only on altivec enabled applications (which is most things these days). The G5 is the major jump in technology. 32bit to 64bit RISC for the techrats in the group.

I've run osx on my 300mhz G3 powerbook and it's painful to use certain applications, so it's useless for a production machine at that point for me (it checks email and surfs the web fine though). I've used osx on a dual 800mhz G4.... and it was still painful using things like Photoshop... just too clunky. I used osx on a dual 1.44ghz and it was USABLE... although I wouldn't still compare it to using photoshop on my G3 in os9. The processing is faster obviously... but the interface is still clunky. OSX Panther on a G5? I'm sure it rocks right along.


It's only after we've lost everything...
That we're free to do anything...