Neither have a lot of money and her mom is active in her church and used the computer for basic news letters, emails and so on.

The Dell POS she had, was well, a POS! It was all plastic and not put together very well and was running XP.

It was full of viruses and the Anti-virus program kept popping up every 2 minutes which made the machine even slower.

I copied over her email accounts onto a USB stick and Mail was able to read the cards.

I gave her my SP G5 tower (which looks like an expensive piece of art next to the Dell) with OS 10.5.8.

The only hiccup was the time it took to upgrade everything on a slow internet connection, plus she had an oddball HP Printer that OS 10.5 said no printer drivers existed for. But a quick look at HP showed there as in fact OX drivers. Once installed, it printed and scanned perfectly. Once again, the download was slow....

I spent about a half hour introducing her to the Mac OS, AppleWorks, NeoOffice, iPhoto and so on.

She couldn't believe how fast the G5 was compared to her Dell and she kept commenting how "pretty" everything looked on the Mac.

Looking back at 10.5, it was a really decent operating system. I like the color it had versus the monochromatic look of 10.7. Plus, the OEM scanner drivers actually work!

And compared to the Dell, the old G5 tower was a speed demon.

I'm glad to see it back in use.

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Bryan
______________________________________________________
Mac Mini 2.4 GHz/8GB ram/OS 10.8.X
MacBook Pro (Early 2008 model) 2.4 GHz, 2GB ram, 200GB hard drive/ Mac OS 10.8.X and XP SP3
iPhone 4S iOS 6 64GB
Location: Cincinnati

HandmeDown Leadah ! Well done !

Its a solid machine. its sad to see those machines die through lack of software support. lack of browser updates and increased video viewing will be the final straw.

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and in the winter, it can heat her room.

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[www.giyf.com]

Good for you . That was an act of kindness.


Fred

Decay beat me to it. My wife loves her new i7 iMac, but misses the warmth that her basement office had from the Dual 2.0GHz G5 tower.

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Good Luck!
Jamie Dresser
Other World Computing

Well, great! I tried to give my very old (10 years) Power Mac G4, had it all set up for her, but alas, she had thousands of files in MS Works... Too many to try to deal with and that she could not do without. Oh well, at least yours got a great Mac.

Nice, Bryan.

I suggest you not have her get used to Appleworks since it hasn't been updated for a decade or so and is a dead end. I would also forego NeoOffice in favor of LibreOffice.

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Quote
mattkime
Its a solid machine. its sad to see those machines die through lack of software support. lack of browser updates and increased video viewing will be the final straw.

TenFourFox is a fork of the current Firefox release schedule which still runs on 10.4.11 (hence the name) and 10.5.x. I use it, it works, and in any case, 10.5.8 still works great on the web with Safari 5.0.6. I haven't hit any incompatibilities (though I don't use Flash much, if at all) and I'm posting this from an iBook G4 1.2 using the aforementioned OS and Safari.

There's legs in them old machines, yet!

Nice move Bryan. Glad to hear there are still people out there like yourself.

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Grateful11

For basic newsletters and emails, that machine is more than capable. I have a G4/733 running 10.5.8 that I use with my old scanner. Other than the fact that the fan is a little loud, it's a great machine. And the fact that I paid $20 for the machine with 17" Apple LCD monitor makes it even better.

Good work! After the Dell, I would think the G5 would be pretty elegant.

Thumbs up, dude.

Quote
Lew Zealand
TenFourFox is a fork of the current Firefox release schedule which still runs on 10.4.11 (hence the name) and 10.5.x. I use it, it works, and in any case, 10.5.8 still works great on the web with Safari 5.0.6. I haven't hit any incompatibilities (though I don't use Flash much, if at all) and I'm posting this from an iBook G4 1.2 using the aforementioned OS and Safari.

There's legs in them old machines, yet!

Yep. My old iBook G4 is still running strong. In no particular order, Boxer (DosBOX frontend), DeDRM, TenFourFox, MacTubes (great option for watching YouTube videos), TextEdit, and Preview are my most used apps.