Hello again! I had some OSX questions this week, so it’s time to talk about Apple’s powerful new operating system, and whether ugrading is a good idea for you. With some caveats, the answer is a resounding “Yes!” Mac OSX (pronounced “oh-ess-ten”) marries traditional Mac ease-of-use with the powerful, stable underpinnings of UNIX. There are now over five million OSX users, and over 5000 applications written “native” for OSX, and the numbers climb every day. Mac applications written for OS9 and prior won’t run in OSX. Don’t despair, because when you upgrade to OSX you’ll also have OS9, and you can boot into either one. OSX also has what’s called the “Classic environment”, which uses your OS9 to run your older applications alongside the OSX environment. So, there are few backwards compatibility issues. Every major productivity application, including Microsoft Office, Quicken and QuickBooks, and Photoshop, to name a few, come in an OSX version.

What about hardware? OSX isn’t very hard drive space hungry, but it loves a lot of RAM and a fast video card. You’ll need at least 256MB of RAM and 16MB of video RAM. With the current low RAM prices ($49 for 256MB), now’s a good time to get more RAM anyway.

If you don’t have at least a G3 processor, forget it. However, OSX runs quite well on a 500 Mhz G3, and of course really screams on a newer G4 machine.

So, what are some compelling reasons to upgrade? OSX is the future of the Mac – in fact, Apple has announced that later this year all new Macs will boot only into OSX (they’ll still have the Classic environment). All new Apple applications, like the new Safari web browser and the iLife digital lifestyle applications (iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie and iDVD) will only be written for OSX. Also, OSX is rock solid stable. It has protected memory (one application crashing won’t bring the whole system down), advanced virtual memory, and can run as many programs at once as you have the time for.

What, we’re out of space? Darn. If you have any more questions about your Mac, drop me a note at petez@macmaineiac.com. I’d love to hear from you. Until next time, Semper Mac.

Oh, I almost forgot! The Maine Mac Owners & Operators Society (MMOOS) user group meeting is this coming Tuesday night (January 21st) at Brunswick High School. Check out their website at: www.mmoos.org for more information. Go and make new friends! You’ll love it.

© 2003 Peter F. Zimowski