[iBook] iBook 500 slow

[Larry Kollar]

>> I am anxious to salvage the apps on the iBook. It has
>> MS Office and Illustrator and Photoshop and Quark....
>
> Since you do not have the original disks for these programs you do not 
> own
> them. The official word for this is piracy.

Instead of ranting over what is probably innocent ignorance, why not 
suggest
alternatives?

Toss MS Office and replace it with NeoOffice -- 
http://www.neooffice.org/ -- it's
a free (although large) download, thus avoiding ugggly license issues 
and
transference of same. It handles MS Office files well enough, in some 
cases
better than MS apps. If all you're using is Word, you'd probably be 
better off
getting iWork ($79) & using the Pages app. Most people don't need most 
of
Word's features, and those who do (e.g. tech writers like yours truly) 
prefer
something a bit less buggy.

Unless you really need full-blown Photoshop, and you probably don't 
unless
you can afford your own copy, toss it and and get Photoshop Elements 
($90 at
the Apple Store). If you're the gearhead type, you could try a port of 
Gimp for
free (but I wouldn't recommend it if you're not ready to lift the 
pretty Aqua hood
and check out the Un*x plumbing underneath).

Replacing Quark with a free/cheap program is a tougher nut. Scribus --
http://www.scribus.org.uk/ -- may get an OSX port in the next release, 
but that
doesn't help you now.... You could get a trial version of InDesign, I'm 
not sure
if it's time-limited or watermarked/disabled though.

So for a maximum of $169, you've eliminated 2/3 of the piracy problem.

--
Larry Kollar    k  o  l  l  a  r  @  a  l  l  t  e  l  .  n  e  t
"The hardest part of all this is the part that requires thinking."
-- Paul Tyson, on xml-doc