Looking for my 1st Mac

[Justin]

I'm looking to dip my toe into the Mac world for the first time...again, please don't turn this thread into a Mac vs PC debate, been there done that, printed the t-shirt (sorry :wink:)

What's the best/cheapest route into Macsville? I've been looking at the Mac Mini, 2nd hand appears to be around £250.

What OS should I be looking for? The latest? Also, is the software expensive, i.e. Photoshop in particular?

[Paul]

I am looking for Imac for editing my photographs but can no afordit at the moment :(

[Justin]

That would be the ideal but not going to happen just yet! Thought something like the Mini would get me used to the interface etc.

Photoshop Elements looks like a decent way to get into that, probably more than capable.

[bms]

My Mac is about 20 years old now - it's a Mac Classic which only takes a 720k floppy disc and has a 5" mono screen. The discs have MacWrite and MacPaint on them and that's about it. 20 years on my next purchase will be the iPad 2. Always tempted by the macs, but the prices always put me off.

[Justin]

They certainly aren't cheap and I'm by no means a convert. It's just that, for future career possibilities, I think it would be good to get my head around them.

[swimwivsquid]

If you don't want to spend too much money Justin why not look at a used g4 tower with OSX in some form or other. I am using a g4 with tiger osx and it runs perfectly well for photoshop.The only thing I would say about the Imacs is that they are a sod to get the screen colour balanced as the density and colour changes depending on the angle that you view them at. We did a job a couple of years back and our client loaned us a couple of imacs to work with but we ended up using our towers with a crt screen for predictable colour balance. Still using a Mitsubishi Diamond plus with a G4. The mini might be a good start hooked up to a decent monitor.You could probably use one of your existing monitors. Don't get me wrong the imacs are great for a lot of applications but I would go for a tower G5 and separate monitor if I was upgrading. Come over to the dark side......

[smitch6]

depends on whether u want a lappy or desktop????

if its a laptop you want get a white macbook
make sure you egt the right one though you want the 2.4Ghz because you can upgrade it more than the others
they can be bought at a reasonable price esp on eBay.

i bought mine 18mths ago for around £400

i can't comment too much on desktop as i only have a lappy

but if you need any help info on macs gimme a shout as i have quite a lot of good extras for them :)

and trust me you'll NEVER go back

[smitch6]

when i bought mine it had Tiger OS on it
i looked on apple's website and for the latest Leopard version the price was £25 for a proper genuine CD delivered :)
try getting a genuine brand new windows OS for that price

[Justin]

Thanks guys, food for thought :-)

[smitch6]

i actually have a spare macbook ;)
it needs mending though the power plug blew up for some reason i think someone (not me i bought it like it) plugged the wrong charger in

it site in my bow compartment i keep meaning to get it sorted but haven't got around to it lol

[Justin]

Is it just the charger/supply or the actual input into the macbook? Could be interested if the spec and price are right ;-)

[Justin]

If you don't want to spend too much money Justin why not look at a used g4 tower with OSX in some form or other.

Something like this? Not particularly powerful but lower priced:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=120684776798&category=4603&_trksid=p5197.c0.m619

[smitch6]

i think it has blown something else apart from the plug
i did swap the charger plug over and it still didn't work, but as they are such good machines it's work mending,
i'll get around to doing it one day lol


that 1 that you are looking at isn't very powerful, trust me you'll start doing lots of stuff in PS etc and it'll hang on you
mine's a 2.4Ghz and it struggle's sometimes, i'm now upgrading my ram from 2gb to 4gb today :)
so hopefully that'll help

[swimwivsquid]

Something like this? Not particularly powerful but lower priced:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=120684776798&category=4603&_trksid=p5197.c0.m619

Yes that would be fine. I am running photoshop CS2 on a single processor mac and have no trouble. That computer has dual processors so will run photoshop very efficiently as its designed to run on two processors. If I was in the UK I would go for it. I run 2gb of ram in mine but you could always get more and that is what will make photoshop run faster.Also if you find you need it you can always add another harddrive they are not expensive. I run two in mine. As the seller seems to be a mac reseller ask how much another 2gb of ram would cost.Also remember that a macs processing power is far more efficient than a pc so you can't compare claimed speeds like for like. The mac will be way faster.Hope this helps Justin.

[Justin]

Just reading about building a "Hackintosh", basically a PC running Mac OS.....good way to learn without spending!

[Justin]

Quick update on this. Found a few great sites that detail tried and tested components. I have a PC sat here with a faulty mobo but the processor and graphics card etc. all appear to be compatible with a 'Hackintosh' build. I think I'll give it a go as it'll cost very little to set up a dedicated machine for this.

Anyone advice on best version of OS? Snow Leopard 10.6.6 or would 10.6.2 suffice....all means nothing to me at this stage! Also, can I use a standard Mac kb/mouse with a system like this....I can't see why not?

[smitch6]

i have leopard they say its the best version and its the latest
i have a disc which is genuine :)
i bought it off apple for £25 not sure how much they are now

[Justin]

Apple sell the latest Snow Leopard for £26, it states it's an upgrade disc but I read that it can still be installed as a full version. Looking around all sellers seem to stock only the upgrade disc so I guess thats right.

[smitch6]

yes that's right they say it's an upgrade ;)
but its actually a full install lol
i bought a new HD for mine and installed using that disk and it worked fine

i could lend you mine but for that price is it worth it?

i'd like to see anyone buying a genuine windows install direct from MS for that price

[Justin]

Just looking at some very cheap Macs on Fleabay and wonder if any may be half decent to get me started....or am I better off going down the Hackintosh route?

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=180623576519&ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT
Full setup but single core.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=270709871313&ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT
Single core

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=300524009270&ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT
Great spec but more expensive

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=160543076124&ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=190504252539&ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT
Full setup looks ok.

[smitch6]

if funds afford Justin always go for the higher spec
that way you can add more ram and a bigger HD

with the low spec ones ram is very limited etc
my macbook i tried to put 4Gb of ram in and it wudn't work so i had to settle on 3Gb

so it defo pays to go for higher spec esp with using software and all the images we have with websites etc on our pc's

[swimwivsquid]

That G5 looks a good price but see how much extra ram would cost.The person selling looks like a dealer so they may put some more in for you at a small price. Certainly worth asking. The great thing about these towers as opposed to a laptop is that they are expandable.

[photoscape]

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/M9590-APPLE-G5-POWERMAC-DUAL-CORE-2-0-2GB-250GB-/120693349280?pt=UK_Computing_Apple_Desktops_CV&hash=item1c19e25ba0#ht_2252wt_1178


i always watch this guy on ebay scrumpy macs, has has had them as low as 225 for a dual core, you can pick single core up for around £170 for a 1.8 dual core you can get for 195 - 220 if you shop around on ebay and dont rush

[Paul Richards]

Before you spend your hard earned money Justin, I was PC then Mac and now run both due to certain software packages only working on PCs. Will not use emulators on Macs (so PC software can work on Macs}.When I started with sublimation printing was advised Ricoh, fine, but was told to use PCs rather than Macs. So I use a PC laptop just for the running of templates and Photoshop CS4.Running CS4 due to using less memory than CS5.
My workflow is done on a Imac using CS5 so images and artwork can fit the templates, then transfered via a memory stick to the PC.
Have you thought about getting Educational discount on Macs? If you have access to a student card you can make a substancial saving on a new macs, and all macs sold this way come with a free 3 year warranty

[Justin]

I repaired my old PC (see other thread!) and was careful over which mobo I installed. All components are now compatible as per Hackintosh set-up so at some stage I'm going to have a go installing Mac OS.

I'm not a Mac man, PC's running through my veins. I just wanted to give it a go as I'd hoped to get some work locally and it would have been useful to get the experience, this is unlikely now but I'll still have a go out of interest :-)

[Draner]

Second hand is definitely a good way to get into Macs but I would recommend spending a bit more and getting one with an Intel processor. The G4 and G5s work perfectly but more and more software is now requiring the Intel chipset, having said that Photoshop CS4 with run on G5s and Intel.

Im currently running an iMac 2.8 GHz Core 2 Duo with 4GB RAM OS X 10.6.7 and its more then powerful enough to run photoshop CS4 Extended and some more.

The one down side is that there is less support for Macs with it comes to sublimation, For example Powerdriver is Windows only so you have to download ICC profiles for printing but I feel the pros far outweigh the cons.

[bms]

The one down side is that there is less support for Macs with it comes to sublimation

Maybe not - you may find you become the fountain of all knowledge!

[Justin]

Resurrecting an old'ish thread here.....

Getting a bit fed up of WinXP not being stable, slowing down and so on. Wondering if running a Mac by the side may convert me. i don't want to spend a fortune but have been looking at the G5's on eBay, £250-£300 seems ok. Would need monitor (guess I can use existing) kboard and mouse. Reading back through the posts regardind comments to go for a newer one but I don't think funds would allow.

Probably only run CS3 and a couple of other things to see how I get on so don't need really high spec, just something decent with a good chunk of RAM maybe? Looked at Scrumpjack on eBay as suggested, less than £250 for a dual 2 but not sure about 64Mb graphics, how would this compare to a decent spec PC?

Part of me still wonders if throwing the money at improving my PC may help but it'll still be running Windows.

Anyhow, appreciate any further advice at this stage. Difficult to make the move completely as I want to keep using PC for sublimation, CoralDraw etc.

[Ian M]

Justin, I seem to be having the same kind of problems running Windows Vista. I keep getting told by various 'experts' to move onto Windows 7 as it is much more stable.

[John G]

Hate win 7 - just cannot get used to not having outlook express too!

[swimwivsquid]

Justin, I seem to be having the same kind of problems running Windows Vista. I keep getting told by various 'experts' to move onto Windows 7 as it is much more stable.Either that Ian or go back to XP which is more stable than Vista. If your computer has the spec then definately upgrade to 7. Vista is a poor operating system.

Justin, if you can get hold of a Mac for a couple of hundred quid go for it. You won't be disapointed. I use both and much prefer the Mac OS for photography and graphics. I have mine networked so that I can send the files over to the PC for printing. In the photographic industry I think I'm still correct in saying that most prefer to use macs for working on. They are more intuitive. Good luck.

[mgibbs]

Windows 7 is the best Windows yet.

My PC came with Vista, which was generally ok, but 7 is leaps and bounds better.

If your pc will run xp it'll run 7 - as long as there are drivers available for it.
There is an upgrade advisor tool on Micro$oft's website to check compatibility.

One thing to bear in mind though, if you do go the 7 route, is that you can't do an in place upgrade - you have to re-install Windows and all your programs again.
For some reason MS call this a "custom upgrade"!

Mark

[Justin]

I've read a lot recently about Vista being no good. Is XP Pro any more stable? Running that on my laptop and (touch wood) it's always been very good.

I've had a play with Win7 but decided to stick with XP....maybe I should play again?

Bit worried about having to start over again with Software for a Mac, CS3 prob. around £200 for a start?

[John G]

If you have old printers by aware that they might not work anymore with win7 - some people have suggested work around's but I haven't fathomed out how to do it.

[Justin]

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Apple-iMac-2-GHZ-2-GB-Ram-17-250-HDD-/150632965401?pt=UK_Computing_Apple_Laptops_ET&hash=item23126ca519

This interests me, being sold with CS5 pre-installed.

[Ian M]

I always thought XP Pro was the best I have ever used & a lot of companies still use XP today.

[Paul]

Justin, I seem to be having the same kind of problems running Windows Vista. I keep getting told by various 'experts' to move onto Windows 7 as it is much more stable.
coz it is :)
windows 7 is veryy good system. is sort of mix xp with vista all in good way lol :)

[mgibbs]

We still use XP but are migrating to 7 - have done around 30 now with no real problems.

Mark

[Draner]

http://www.webmasterworld.com/microsoft_windows_os/3231524.htm

There are still massive amounts of people out there using XP, so many that Microsoft extended the support for it for an extra 5 years. It is still a very good(for a Microsoft) OS. I did use windows 7 for a time before moving to Mac and found it to be considerable amount better than Vista, but i still cant work out why it updates all that time, It seams like every day i turn the laptop on at work and it configures more updates. Then the Anti virus needs up dating and the firewall setting are incorrect then there are those times where it just stops, and the questions. "are you sure?" "are you really sure?" "do you really want to do that?" "this might have been downloaded from the internet. are you sure you want to open it?" "updates are available for this computer" "windows need to restart in order to finish installing updates" and my fav one "windows update needs to update in order to install updates"

It did take me a little while to get use to using a Mac but I aint ever going back. once a mouth (at most) my mac pops up a little window that says" there are some updates available for your computer. Would you like to install them now?"

The only downside to the mac is that everything is still geared toward windows, although the software list available for Mac is getting much bigger there is still the odd one that you cant have, but in most cases there is a equivalent that is just as good or better.

Sorry rant over. yeah buy a Mac, I would still recommend a Intel over G4 or G5, mostly because Snow Leopard is just Awesome and the Intel's support more software, Including Windows for when your PC completely gives up.

[mgibbs]

I'd say price is another downside :)

Mark

[Draner]

I'd say price is another downside :)

Mark

Granted the cost of a new one is quite high, but a quick look at the second hand value. Eg. I paid 1100 quid for mine 3 years ago, I could put it on ebay tomorrow and get £600. So £500 over 3 years. you could easily spend that on a PC and not expect much more than 3 years out of it IMO

[mgibbs]

I'd want more than 3 years out of a pc - especially if I paid as much as £500 for one :)

Mark

[Justin]

Windows 7 or XP Pro.....32 or 64 bit....anyone any opinions on what's the best?

[Draner]

I think it's personal preference between 7 and xp. But 64 bit is better if u want more than 3 or 4 gb of ram

[mgibbs]

Windows 7 is better than xp in most respects. It is, however, a different look and feel so will seem quite different at first.

Nearly all Windows 7 pcs sold now are 64 bit. If yu want 32 bit you'll have less choice and will probably pay a higher price.

Unless you work in a domain environment I don't think you'd need to pay the extra for pro over home.

Mark

[smitch6]

gotta jump on this :) (being a mac loverrrrr)
win 7 is lossely based on a mac there's so much which is similar it's funny

Apple are bringing out a new OS soon i had the email a few weeks back and i think it'll be around the £30 mark
how often can you buy a genuine win OS for that sorta money??

i would NEVER go back to windows
the wife has a windows pc as she has to for work and there's the odd programme which will not run on a mac like my embroidery one
so i have to use her lappy and i hate every second of it lol
it takes ages to start up and shut down it's always freezing (although saying that when i'm using PS5 my mac struggles when i have about 5+ documents open ) lol

[mgibbs]

Windows will start up much more quickly if you use Sleep or Hibernation modes to shut it down.

Mark

[Justin]

Whilst I decide which way to go longer term I'm having a play with Windows 7 64 bit. Initial thoughts are that it's running better than XP but I'm not running masses of memory or a particularly powerful system right now.

[djhutton]

Hate win 7 - just cannot get used to not having outlook express too!

Same here, not keen on all the large 'buttons' on windows live mail. Might have a solution though - have just purchased Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus from software4students.co.uk for under £40. (they don't ask for any student number)

Includes outlook so that might be a good option to get back to the outlook type email. Also MS Live mail won't sync with contacts on iphone which is a pain whereas outlook and outlook express seem to work nicely.

Be interesting to see how that goes.

Also looking a mac (imac) at the mo as I fancy a change, sounds like the emulation software works ok for using the odd windows program - we'll see :-)

DJ

[mgibbs]

An alternative to the Micro$oft mail offerings is Thunderbird from Mozilla (the Firefox people).

Mark

[Justin]

I was looking last night and it appeared you could download Outlook Express for nothing. I've been playing with other software, Thunderbird is good but I seem to have problems setting accounts up in there. I've been testing Postbox this last few days, very simple software...very..but seems to work ok. OE takes some beating though.

[JSR]

http://www.webmasterworld.com/microsoft_windows_os/3231524.htm

There are still massive amounts of people out there using XP, so many that Microsoft extended the support for it for an extra 5 years.
The reason this happened was because of netbooks. Four years ago (just as XP's support was about to end), Asus developed the netbook market which took off wildly. At first netbooks came with Linux, but Microsoft saw that they were losing out. Vista was too bloated and too much of a resource-hog to make it practical for netbooks. All Microsoft had was XP. So they quickly extended the support for XP and allowed netbook manufacturers to put it on netbooks on the cheap - this pretty much killed off the "Linux" variant of netbooks.

Microsoft did say that Windows 7 would counter the bloated nature of Vista and would make it more netbook-friendly. Then other manufacturers jumped on the netbook bandwagon, flooding the market with inferior models to increase their profit margins (making them bigger and replacing the SSDs with HDDs). The larger capacity hard drives on these models allowed Windows 7 to stay as bloated as it is, and it ended up not being so netbook-friendly after all.

Today there are no "real" netbooks anymore (by that I mean 9" models using SSDs), so the whole thing's been consigned to a footnote in the past, but that's the reason XP support was given a new lease of life.

[mgibbs]

I think extension of XP support is more to do with the fact that huge numbers of businesses were put off by Vista so remained with XP.

We've done that here. Trialled Vista and decided that its hardware requirement would mean replacing around 300 pcs so we didn't bother.

Windows 7 is much more like XP in its hardware requirement so we started a gradual rollout of 7 at the end of last year. So far its been a success with only 2 programs unable to run under 7. One is written in-house so will be re-written and the other was a very old CAD frontend system and we were wanting to migrate away from it anyway.

Mark

[djhutton]

Tried the free download of outlook express but it doesn't work with 7 or vista which is a shame - hence the search for a legit copy of outlook.

DJ

[ptholt]

Did you ever try the Hackintosh route Justin?

I have worked in IT for over 20 years, from pre windows green screen things, to a pc on every desk (and i have to laugh when everyone talks about virtualisation and cloud services, its just like we used to use 15 years ago lol).

I have about 12 machines around the house in various guises -
2 x linux based media players streaming from a NAS
2 x macs (one imac for the wife, a dual quad core Intel mac pro for me)
3 x win 7 desktops for the kids (a little easier for there school stuff, till they go to uni which is more mac aware or so im told)
2 x win 7 laptops when out and about (would like a macbook pro, but see below)
1 x macbook air (so deliciously light and small had to get one)
1 x win 7 netbook (kids ultra portable)
1 x win 7 dell xps that acts as a gateway to my plotter and printer as they are usb only and in a different part of the house (and it was cheaper than a third apple mac just to sit there).

So im fairly confident in my IT abilities, 3-4 years ago i bought the wife her first imac, one of the white ones, i paid about £500 for a year old one from a client of mine that was struggling to get on with it.

We ran this till 18 months ago, and when we came to sell it, it fetched £475 on ebay..... which meant the purchase of her new silver one was pretty well subsidised, this is not something that generally happens with pcs in my experience, they normally in my house get stripped, useful aprts kept for spares and the rest goes to the tip..

returning from a three holiday approx 18 months ago i was at the time running a fairly high spec pc, q9550 cpu, 8gb ram, 1gb video etc on windows 7.
On getting back into the office my wife and i turned our machines on and both were up and running fairly quickly, however my wife was reading through her emails, yet my machine appeared to only want to do what it wanted, it wanted to update win7, update the anti virus, update windows defender, run a scan, update my other anti - spyware program, update this, that and the bleeding other all whilst steadfastly refusing to do anything else.

Somewhat frustrated watching my wife merrily click through her emails whilst all this was going on, and her steadfast refusal to leave mac land once she had entered i took the plunge and bought the mac pro.

It has on the most part been something of a revelation that i wished i had done years ago, it felt a little empowering in that i no longer felt like the tail was wagging the dog.
Granted the initial purchase price was high, however its a seriously chunky piece of kit (so at least feels like it warrants it, though a large part of the cost is the badge), but other things like adding memory, extra hard drives take 10 seconds and dont require fingers 12 cms long and .5 wide due to being surrounded in spaghetti.

Accessories via ebay are surprisingly cheap (i just bought an extra 8gb of ram (on top of the 22gb its currently running) purely because a store was selling some kingston ram brand new and sealed on ebay for £50, sounds cheap to me!

Don't flame me to much, i still run windows machines, i actually really like windows 7 and it has blurred the lines between windows and mac os. But would i go back to microsoft for my own personal machine in the near future? No chance, but i do pander to ms in that i run Parrallels software that allows me to open windows file formats at the touch of a button by having a windows 7 session running (in parrallel - get it?) with my mac os.

[Justin]

Not done much more really. I have a PC built up to Hackintosh specs but the kids are using it at the moment :-) My PC appears very stable since I stopped allowing automatic updates.

I've toyed with the idea of getting a mac, I think I'd go the iMac route but have to find the money for the software as well. I've started playing with Linux installs again and have currently settled with Linux Mint which seems OK.

[ptholt]

i'm running ubuntu on two media players around the house with xbmc running on top, they dont need massive spec, massive ram, they just work well and fast with very little fuss and drama

[smitch6]

i'd love a macbook air or pro, i have a normal white macbook at present and love it but it does struggle occasionly when running dreamweaver, photoshop and tons of websites open rofl

[JSR]

i'm running ubuntu on two media players around the house with xbmc running on top, they dont need massive spec, massive ram, they just work well and fast with very little fuss and drama
Do you know any brand of Linux that'll run on really old-spec machine? I have an ancient laptop here which I think is a P120, 16MB RAM, 1GB HDD, no CD, no USB, no floppy drive, 800x600 screen. I managed to shoe-horn Windows 98 on it some time back, but I'd prefer something that could be secured against current threats.

[ptholt]

there are a couple of variants that spring to mind, but there are a couple of linux live cd where you can test different variants, the problem you do have is getting it on something with no usb or optical drives.
I would suggest copying it onto the hd and running it from there if possible

[JSR]

Yeah, that's always a problem for that machine. I don't really want to go in blind because of the difficulty in recovering it when things go pear shaped. At the moment, it's working with Windows 98 on it (simply by copying the cab files to the drive and running setup from there - I used to have a parallel port Zip drive when I did that). So it is working for basic stuff so long as I don't do anything silly like connect it to the internet and risk viruses etc.

Was hoping there might be something small and suited to old hardware. Linux used to be ideal for resurrecting old machines, but most modern distros seem to have embraced bloat and need a good chunk of specifications just to run. I mean Ubuntu needs 1GB RAM and 5GB disk space. With that kind of bloated requirement, they may as well call the distro "Windows 7". Even the so-called "lightweight" versions of Ubuntu needs 256MB RAM and 2GB disk space. That's just crazy specs for what I'm trying to do.

My personal favourite distro on my other (more modern) machines is Puppy Linux on a bootable USB but, though that doesn't take up much space (and so could be installed alongside Windows while testing the old laptop), I think it needs far more resources than that old laptop has to offer (128-256MB RAM, for example).

Any ideas which distros will run with 16MB RAM and P120 chip? Obviously it's going to have to be a real basic GUI, but I can live with that. I did dabble with TCL awhile back on my netbook, but that might be a little too much "bare bones" - I'd like a distro that'll give me a step up from Windows 98, not a step down.

[ptholt]

the last small liinux i used on an old compaq evo laptop for a friend was puppy linux, worked fine (although it did have a single usb which made life easier), the puppy forum has quoted as little as 128mb running puppy. It also has a "frugal" hard drive installation set of instructions to follow although they do not recommend it, preferring usb or optical drive.

Slitaz also gets good omments on old hardware but its site is down currently, supposed to be very fast and has hard drive installation options as well.

[Paul]

how about this Jonathan?? http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/ or http://www.slackware.com/

[JSR]

how about this Jonathan?? http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/ or http://www.slackware.com/
Hmm, Slackware needs 64MB RAM but DSL doesn't. DSL looks like a more useful version of TCL. Might be worth investigating, particularly if it'll run off a CF card (the laptop has a PCMCIA port and I have a CF adapter for it somewhere) so I could try it out without mucking up the Windows install. I'll have to see if the laptop will boot to the PCMCIA, though.

Thanks!

[ptholt]

i did think of dsl, but noticed in this review here - http://tuxradar.com/content/whats-best-lightweight-linux-distro it had not been updated or supported for a little while.

[JSR]

That's worth bearing in mind. Thanks. I don't mind it being out-dated, so long as it's not going to suffer from security issues (that's my main concern about running Win98 on the laptop).