Linkstew

My dad, like my whole family, has a Mac. His is a Blue and White G3 ("Yosemite"). He's had it for nearly two years, and while the machine is still perfectly capable, his software is less than well behaved. The primary source of his problems is CorelDraw 8, which is rather notorious being buggy. When my dad is using CorelDraw, he can't go more than an hour without the computer freezing. The resulting restarts he has to endure, in addition to the lost unsaved work, probably cost him more than an hour of work for each item he produces.

That lost time is completely ridiculous, and I'm surprised he puts up with it as well as he does. Certainly, it makes him angry when it freezes up at some critical moment, but he deals with it pretty well all things considered. But, the stars in the Macintosh world have aligned, and the time is now right to give him Mac OS X. Here's the plan:

1. Upgrade the computer from Mac OS 8.1 to 9.2 for iPod compatibility.
2. Back up his computer on my iPod.
3. Remove his hard drive and install a new 40 gig drive.
4. Install Mac OS X 10.1 and Mac OS 9.2.1 for Classic.
5. Install his software, including Microsoft Office v.X and Corel Graphics Studio 10
6. Restore his files from my iPod.
7. Do basic configuration of things.

It's possible that something will work so poorly that I'll have to downgrade him to Mac OS 9.2, but I hope that won't happen. I hope he'll be able to work with Photoshop through Classic, because he does most of his work in the Corel apps which are OS X native. Hopefully his scanner and printer will work out all right. Hopefully he's more productive than he was with the old system. And hopefully the stable new system will be able to make his computing experience fun again.