I'm doing OK now -- My powerbook has a 30GB hard drive, and 300MB of RAM...but I couldn't figure out why it was running so slow. Here's #1 thing I learned about pre-OSX macs: You can control how much memory is assigned to each application, on a program-by-program basis. IE was the biggest dog -- it would often give me errors about 'not enough memory to..." (mostly with large images or Flash animations). Open it up, to find out it was only assigned 8MB of RAM by default (or by the previous owner). Cranked that baby up to 50MB of RAM, and it runs slick. The pain in the ass? I have to go through now and 'turn up' all the applications as I figure out which are running poorly with low memory. Photoshop gets another 50MB, Word gets 20MB, Mozilla gets 20MB (I no longer use IE; very slow on it's own anyway). While I can see the advantage of assigning memory windows individually, it's a pain that it has to be handled manually.

The next thing I learned about Macs is that key combinations don't work the same way. Sometimes, they do, but not always, and that's what makes it a pain.

Next, I learned I really, really like a two-button mouse. Having to hold down a button on the keyboard (which one? Depends on what you want it to do) is a pain.

The next thing I learned? My 266Mhz PowerMac really isn't so slow. Yes, it's noticably slower than my 1.1Ghz PC with 1GB of RAM, but not as different as a 266Mhz PC is. a 266Mhz PC running the software I'm running on this Mac, well, it might not even be possible (I don't think I could get Photoshop to run properly on that slow of a PC).

And, the Mac has an add-on USB card (which wasn't technically supposed to work, but drivers for a different card work fine), and my USB SmartMedia reader has Mac drivers, and my Epson has Mac drivers, and I haven't check on my scanners yet, but I'm sure they have Mac drivers somewhere around here, too...Macs might be a pain sometimes to use, but it's not from incompatibility or lack of software.

In other news: business is horrible, money is tight, and one member of the family has no legal proof of her own name. Life's grand, ain't it?