[MANFRIENDS]

-
This summer, I am planning on switching from PC - MAC. Money is an issue, being a student and I am considering the new eMac's that were released (a month ago?)

Just wondering if this box could run illustrator/photoshop/quark or indesign simultaniously without rightous slowdowns and without crashing?

thanks.

-MANFRIENDS (the original good man)

[Bill Posters]

A 1.25Ghz G4 running OS X 10.3 should breeze through handling those apps without any problems.
256MB RAM should be enough to get along with, but spend what you can afford on filling it up with ram and it only gets better.

[tomson]

Originally Posted by MANFRIENDS

-Just wondering if this box could run illustrator/photoshop/quark or indesign simultaniously without rightous slowdowns and without crashing?

Its unlikely to crash but it will run like a dog. 256mb of ram is simply not enough to run all that lot at once at anything like a usable speed - I'd recommend you get another 256 at the very least (more if you can afford it). Ram is pretty cheap.

[Bill Posters]

Fwiw™…

My G4/400 (w/ 704MB RAM) may not be the quickest off the blocks by today's standards, but it's more than capable of running all those apps together without slowing my workflow to a crawl.

I appreciate that the demands of apps and OSs have increased with each new generation, but computing power is increasing faster.
Computer 'power users' still somehow managed to produce entire books, magazines, albums and just about every element of advertising, design, music and dtp on pre-Quadras back in the day.

Of course, faster is better when it comes to machine response times, but you can get perfectly acceptible speeds and capabilities on machines other than whatever top-of-the-range machines company-X is trying to convince you that you 'need'.

[tomson]

Bill - stop theorising. Its getting boring.

Last weekend I used a friends emac to quickly edit several hundred wedding photos I'd shot for her. It had 256mb of ram. It was running photoshop CS, Mail and Safari and Fetch. The PS files were roughly 9mb each, they were being converted from raw to jpeg and being downsized. It was running OS 10.3 and it was far from quick - slower infact than my 733 at home. The slowdown is due simply to an insufficient amount of ram.

Fwiw™…(sigh) OS 10.3 is more memory hungry than what you are using, and the new emacs come with 10.3.

[Bill Posters]

And there I was thinking we were singing from the same hymn sheet when it comes to ram.

[tomson]

think again sunshine