When the hard drive crashed for the last time on my husband's PC, it seemed like the perfect time to switch to Mac for our production company. I've been a Mac user for 7 years, but since his PC was newer and had lots more memory than my old LCII, I had begrudgingly been doing our graphics on it, until the crash.
When we started looking into the Macs, we were drawn to the new "Blue" G-3. Since we were going to be making a major investment, we wanted something that our company could expand with and use for several years. When I explained my needs to the good folks at Comp USA, we were steered toward the 350 mhz model. We didn't really consider the desktop "beige" model because we were warned that they were going to be "phased out. We were desperate, with our current project dead in the water, so we slapped down the plastic and got the blue G3-350. Little did we know that we had entered what one source referred to as the "bleeding edge of technology."
We found ourselves suddenly faced with the following issues:
- There were no USB port modems available, and most sources were back-ordered for at least a week, if not several.
- The USB port printer we had purchased (replacing the PC compliant printer) did not have a driver that would work for the new blue G-3s. We had to access the driver from an internet source and download it to make it work. Catch-22: no modem, no internet access, no driver. Calling the company, they said they would send one in the mail and bill us the shipping cost. It would take a week.
- The modem adapters available through sources such as Griffin technologies were also back-ordered.
- The blue G-3 has no floppy drive. We needed one to try to retrieve and replace several of the files my husband had attempted to rescue from the crashed PC. We were told that we should purchase a superdrive for $150.
- To add insult to injury, when I turned the blue G-3 on the first time, and began to try to get around on the desktop, it froze.
After tearing our hair out, I began to question my purchase. We needed a computer now, not a week or a month from now. I went back to Comp USA and began speaking in-depth with a customer who was purchasing the desktop Power Mac G-3. He was doing work similar production work and told me that the desktop Power Mac G3 was absolutely sufficient for him, and about $1,200 less expensive. We jumped the blue G-3 ship, and traded it in for a desktop Power Mac, purchasing a great modem at the same time. Now I have a Mac, with a floppy drive, a modem and a printer that works.
Almost end of story.
Although I am so far pleased with our desktop Power PC (when I turned it on it froze - HA!) we have not cleared all of our technological hurdles.
Do any of you MacUsers have experience in transferring Quicken files from DOS to Mac?
Also, since these G-3s come with basically no software, our project is still moving at a slow crawl. Does anyone out there have a used but not too old version of PageMaker and Photoshop that I could purchase? Please e-mail us.
Thanks for being a great community of support. — Ginger and Luke Sands
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