Mac Desktops?

[ffutures]

I want to look seriously at updating my computers after the next Forgotten Futures is finished.

I'm still not convinced that Linux is the answer to my computer problems, although it does seem to be a good way to give a PC a second lease of live without having to buy bloody Windows.

This leaves me with three main options:

1. Buy Windows 7 and try to get it working on the most recent of my PCs. Not entirely sure I want to go this route - I get the impression that there are enough compatibility problems that I might end up regretting it.
2. Buy a new Windows 7 box. Ditto
3. Buy a Mac, possibly something like a good 2nd-hand G5. Defininte software problems, but if I'm likely to need new software either way I might as well go this route, it probably isn't much more expensive.

So assuming I did decide to go the Mac route, and wanted to do it on the cheap, what should I be looking at? I can see some G5 boxes with OS-X 10.5 around £150 on Ebay, what's the catch?

• Can I readily get something that will use my 22" VGA monitor? And let me rotate the bastard?
• Can you get keyboards suited to heavy two-finger typists?

Moving onto software:

• What's available for OCR?
• Is there an upgrade path for Acrobat (not reader, the version you pay for) from Windows to Mac?
• Is there a good equivalent to Corel Draw? And a good basic paint program that isn't a PITA to learn?

Probably lots of other questions, but these are main ones for my work needs.

Any thoughts?

Comments

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Speaking of Mac G5s, email me. (I haz a high-end G5 box looking for a new home.)

You should be able to use your VGA monitor with a G5 Mac if you have a DVI-to-VGA cable. Rotation ... OSX 10.6 supports rotation; I'm less certain about 10.5 and you're looking at PowerPC hardware which won't run 10.6.

Keyboards: any old USB board should work.

OCR: OmniPage/X is elderly but works okay on PowerPC kit. (I may be able to give you a license key I'm not using.)

Acrobat/Corel Draw ... the box I'm looking to offload would come with Adobe Creative Suite CS2. (I'm pretty sure that's offering a battleship when you're looking for a destroyer, but even so.)

[saranjeuhal.livejournal.com]

For OCR on my Mac I use VelOCRaptor (http://velocraptor.com/). Great product and works brilliantly.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Holy crap, that's cheap. Does it support really long document? UK English?

[autopope.livejournal.com]

It's based on OCRPus. Which is open source (GPL).

[saranjeuhal.livejournal.com]

Aye, it does. It'll allow you to drop a batch of files together and it'll just process them. I work with TIFFs normally, and then it exports them as PDF files. I then just join all the PDFs together by dropping them in Preview into the one document. The most files I've done in a batch was 96, and it didn't take that long to process them.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

If it doesn't support rotation it might not be worth doing, that's one of the things that has led to me thinking about this more seriously, but I'm certainly interested - you will have mail.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Just realised I have a spare Mac USB keyboard - not quite as clunky as my old IBM AT model, but not too bad.

[dsample.livejournal.com]

The biggest catch with getting a G5 Mac, is that OS 10.5 is the highest level of operating system that will run on it. 10.6 requires an Intel processor.

Corel Graphics Suite 11 is was released for the Mac (you may have to search eBay for a while, to find a copy though.) Graphic Converter has some basic paint capabilities, in addition to all its file format conversion abilities.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Which might be a problem if Apple eventually pull the plug on earlier releases, I suppose. Thanks, I hadn't really thought much about OS support.

[saranjeuhal.livejournal.com]

I was going to mention that. 10.6 changes the way a lot of OS-level stuff works, including a new threading engine. You really want to go Mac Intel if you can.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

[nojay.livejournal.com]

What's the processor in your current Windows box, what RAM can it take and what sort of graphics card slot does it have? I assume you're running XP fully patched at the moment.

I got a Pentium 4 box from Freecycle with XP install media (the disk had been wiped), stuck extra RAM in it to bring it up to 2Gb of RAM and sourced an ATI HD4670 AGP video card from Gumtree. This allows me screen rotation with no problems and it cost me less than seventy quid for the upgrades.

My recommendation would be for you to stick with Windows system as you've already invested in a lot of Windows software and learning how to use it. If you move to Apple kit or Linux then you've also got to worry about sourcing, for example, scanner drivers -- I recall you've got a weird obsolete HP scanner that is see-through and that might be difficult to get working on an Apple system.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

The old windows box is an Athlon 1.8ghz and at its limit on 2gb - it's also AGP 4x which means it won't take many recent AGP cards, and I am not sure I trust the motherboard (or any other part of it) 100% any more.

The other PC (running Ubuntu) is a more recent Packard Bell, Pentium 4, I think 2.8ghz, and can use 4 dimms and AGP x8 - currently has 2x512mb. I'm pretty sure they aren't the same Dimms as the Windows box, of course.

If I could get an XP install disk for it I might be tempted to give it a shot, but I'm pretty sure it only ever had a recovery partition which was crawling with viruses when I turfed out the old disk and shoved in Linux.

[roo2.livejournal.com]

See if you can pick up a used Mac Mini with an Intel CPU. They're only US $700 new, so a used one should be cheap. They use USB keyboards and mice, and come with a mini-DVI adapter for standard monitors. Having an Intel chip means you'll be able to run Snow Leopard. Also, more vendors are dropping support for PPC chips so a low end Intel based one will have a longer life span.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Second-hand prices in the UK are nearly as high as new prices in the USA, unfortunately. I have no idea why, Macs have always been marketed as high-end computers here which may have something to do with it.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

No, it's more a case of (a) Apple hedging against currency fluctuations so that they don't lose money (dollars) if the dollar strengthens, (b) VAT (ack, spit), and (c) Macs holding their resale value very well.

Macs were grotesquely overpriced in Europe until 1992, when Sculley noticed, flew over in person, and fired the European Marketing Director. At which point prices crashed more than 50% in 12 months, making them merely expensive.

They're marketed as high-end computers in the US, too -- mostly because they are.

[heliograph.livejournal.com]

> Buy Windows 7 and try to get it working

There's no good reason to do that.

> Buy a new Windows 7 box. Ditto

If you're going to get a PC and not run Linux, that's your only option now. Windows 7 is better than Vista, but it still has more overhead (and resource requirements) than XP, which is why upgrading can be sketchy. It does handle some things better, though, so if you have a really new PC it might be OK (and possibly even an improvement).

> Buy a Mac, possibly something like a good 2nd-hand G5.

Are they that expensive over there that buying a product that was discontinued four years ago makes financial sense?

Newer software won't run on G5s. Apple support isn't what you're worried about: there's less and less support for Mac software that isn't run on an Intel machine. Frex, new versions of Adobe products, etc.

> Can you get keyboards suited to heavy two-finger typists?

You can use any USB keyboard with Macs made in at least the last five years or so. I've used PC keyboards with Macs regularly. There's a couple of easy key swaps, but it works fine.

> What's available for OCR?

That book I just sent you? I used Acrobat to directly scan it into a PDF, then dumped it as text to clean it up. I've used other Mac OCR products, but since I already had Acrobat 8 Pro...

> Is there an upgrade path for Acrobat (not reader, the version you
> pay for) from Windows to Mac?

Not in the US.

> Is there a good equivalent to Corel Draw? And a good basic paint > program that isn't a PITA to learn?

I've used Corel Draw, but I use Adobe Creative Suite (Illustrator and Photoshop) for all my draw and paint needs. I've been using it so long I can't tell you if it is hard to learn, though.

I'm a Mac guy, but honestly, it seems like you'd get the most bang for your buck if you purchased a new Windows machine.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Maybe - the other one I think I should look at is Nojay's idea of getting the better of the two PCs to run XP rather than Linux (or both, of course), since for me XP is much more of a known quantity than W7. If it had only come with a proper install disk I doubt I would have started this thread, it's considerably better than the machine I work on.

[raygungothic.livejournal.com]

I'm really happy with Windows 7, but I run it on pretty hefty hardware. Vista achieved the remarkable feat of being slow on everything, even a Core i7. W7 is slow on a slow machine, fast on a fast one, which is a little less outrageous.

Older Macs are pretty lovely, rather solid pieces of actual hardware, which is good, because there's almost nothing you can change. But there's no headroom for upgrades at all, and little new software works on PPC. (It's not too hard to code something that runs on both, but it is to code something that runs *well*.) If I didn't have to deal with them at work, and had some spare cash, I might get one as fun to play with - but not as a primary machine.

With newer Macs, the degree of quality premium for the price premium seems to have seriously eroded. Most are quite generic Core 2 Duos with low-end graphics cards priced as if they were made entirely of gold. Second hand prices are correspondingly high. Mac systems are overall quite good systems (hardware and software together) if they exactly meet your needs, but hardware bang for buck is one of their weakest points.

If you have existing PC software licenses it's going to be tricky to get them moved over. Probably cheaper to roll your own PC from parts, and use the savings vs. complete boxes to buy Windows 7 pro (which has a decent version-compatibility tool for legacy programs)

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Thanks - this is the conclusion I think I'm coming to too.