Mac OS Upgrade question for imac 333

[avron]

Hello all. We are new to the Mac world and we are in bad need of your experience and guidance. My daughter teaches art at a school for disadvantaged children and we just received a donation of iMac G3 333Mhz computers with 256mb RAM installed. They have Mac OS 8.5.1. We want to use these machines to run Freehand MX and Photoshop, and we know Freehand needs Mac OS 9.1 or higher, and Photoshop needs Mac OS X v.10.2.8 or v.10.3 supposedly. So we have these questions, please:
With a 333 imac and 256mb RAM, which OS should we install? where can we buy a legal copy of that OS? Where can we buy a legal copy of an old version of Photoshop that will run on our machines (Adobe will not sell us an old one). Thanks in advance. Ron and Tre.

 

[yellow]

I would say eBay might be a good place to start lookging for cheap copies of PS and OS X. And you CAN run 10.3.x on there, no problem, but you will want to max out the amount of RAM it has.

 

[Macky-Mac]

check out ebay for older software like Photoshop

Other World Computing will sell you Mac OS 9 and Older versions of OS 10 at reasonable prices

 

[Lord Blackadder]

I have a 266MHz iMac with OS 10.3.9 installed. It runs OK with 288MB of RAM but Photoshop would be a stretch on it.

These Macs only officially support 384MB RAM, but many people install 512MB without problems. Either way, put as much RAM in as you can afford - 256 is the BARE minimum for OS X.

Your best bet performance-wise would be to use OS 9.2.2 and and older version of Photoshop...I'm not sure where you'd get an old version if Adobe won't sell one. Maybe there is a reseller somewhere that has multiple copies?

 

[avron]

But which version of Photoshop is best for imac 333?

check out ebay for older software like Photoshop

Other World Computing will sell you Mac OS 9 and Older versions of OS 10 at reasonable prices

I went to ebay and I have no idea which old version of Photoshop is the most practical one for our imac 333 G3. Any suggestions?

 

[rjphoto]

I went to ebay and I have no idea which old version of Photoshop is the most practical one for our imac 333 G3. Any suggestions?

I beleive the last non-OSX version of PHotoShop was version 7.

If i remeber correctly, it would install under both OS9 and OSX.

Now as for how well it will run depends on the amount of RAM and how big the images are that you will be working on.

How many iMacs did she get? If there are any that have problems maybe you could salvage some RAM from them for the other machines.

Good luck.