Afternoon, So, my uncle has an old mac, how old? I'm not sure but its been kicking about since Windows XP, it has no WiFi and has Cs2 Photoshop installed. So just go generally old. Now then, my uncle wants to update the machine in order to use a printer he wants. This mac is ONLY used for printing and slight tweaks to photos before printing. He asked at the Apple store about updating and they said it required a CD, is that right? As I sort of expected it would just need plugging into the internet for a few hours to be updated. Its an Epson Stylus Photo R3000 printer, which requires "MacOSX10.4.11 or later". If I do need a Cd, will it be worth the trouble? Or should he ditch the old mac and just get a wee cheapo PC? Thanks for any advice even if my given info is a bit sparse.
You could plug it in and see if Apple still have updates for it online. Does he want to move to a newer OS or just get the right drivers etc?
If it's on say, 10.1 it will only get updates for the 10.1 branch. Apple don't let you upgrade for free, just supply patches for whichever 10.x release you have already. If you want 10.4 you have to buy it. If it can run 10.5 might as well go with that though since it is the most recent for PPC Mac.
You could also point him in the direction of my cheap mac mini and hard drive for sale for 250 in the uk marketplace. Comes with 10.5...
Why get a 250 pound machine when he can get Leopard for 150? If the machine does exactly what he wants well enough, no need to upgrade. Plus if he has an iMac, it means he'd need to get a monitor too.
This is what I would have advised - If it'll run 10.5, get him a copy of that and install it, then do all the update patches etc and install the driver. Is it a tower computer? An iMac? I was working on a wonderful 10 year old Power Mac G4 tower the other day - OS version 9.1 and still running like a dream! It is used in an office I maintain machines for to print using an old piece of software that only runs on OS9.
