Mac Transfer Questions

[Christine1234]

It's been a while. I still have my old Mac collection, and have added another Apple SE. Three days ago I picked up an iMac mid-2009 with El Capitan loaded for $100 from the university's surplus. It has a 2.26 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 2 GB 1067 MHz DDR3 memory.

Now for the questions: It was wiped clean before the install. I downloaded all the updates to the OS. It does not appear to have Adobe Acrobat loaded. Where is a good, safe place to get this?

I'd also like to get a word processing program on it to read and write documents, preferably without photoshop and all that other stuff that goes along with the Microsoft Word office disks. I'm planning to send some things off to (hopefully) get published, so a current program that someone will have no problem reading and opening is a must. Disks would be much nicer than something downloaded by the year. There are a lot of older documents on the old computer that need to be used on the new one. I have some older Microsoft Word disks and could install that if needed. I think the newest one is Office 2004.

It has 2GB of RAM. According to what I've read, iMac09's can do up to 8GB, but on a listing describing the ones sold for education like this one, it did not say that. What are the possibilities of upgrading the RAM in the future and doing a workaround to get Sierra, and possibly whatever comes after it?

And another very important question: Yahoo mail deletes old e-mails after several months unless they've been saved in a folder. The ppc g5 has all the older ones that I still need for various reasons backed up on it under mail. Is there any easy way to transfer them?

There's also some way to transfer info from one Mac to the other using some sort of cable. How complicated is this?

The g5 ppc running 10.5.8 was and still is doing the job very well. It's a Mac! It's reliable and does what's needed, but there were a few news videos that it couldn't play. The newer OS os great, and some of the pictures on it are fantastic!

Thanks!

 

[kschendel]

You can definitely upgrade the RAM to at least 8 GB; my own early 2009 is running that much. Whether you can go higher, I don't know. I think it will run Sierra as-is without any hacks (not 100% sure though, I'm still running El Cap on mine.) I don't understand your question re Adobe Acrobat; I'd expect that the right place to get it is from adobe.com, were you looking for a different answer?

MS Word doesn't include photoshop, perhaps you were thinking of PowerPoint? That iMac will run Mac Pages, which can print to PDF's which are a common format. (Of course, if your targeted publisher will only take Word, like some I know of, you are stuck.) Pages is OK, its two main advantages are a) it's not Word, and b) it's reasonably predictable so the "wtf is it doing NOW?" factor is much lower. The other non-Word alternative I can think of is LibreOffice which I have no experience of on a Mac.

I'm afraid I have no idea about your yahoo mail question.

Mac-to-mac transfer can be done various ways. If they are both on the same local network, probably one of the simplest is to enable File Sharing (via System Preferences, Sharing) and simply mount one machine's filesystem on the other one. (Finder, Go, Connect-To-Server.) You can then copy files over with Finder drag-and-drop. Another way is Target Disk Mode which makes one Mac look like a disk drive to another. Google is your friend.

IMO the most likely killer of your new(old) iMac is its hard drive. Consider replacing it with an el cheapo SATA SSD, which is relatively easy to do on the 2009's. 8 Gb memory and an SSD, and that machine should be good for a few more years, barring catastrophic failure.

 

[Christine1234]

You can definitely upgrade the RAM to at least 8 GB; my own early 2009 is running that much. Whether you can go higher, I don't know. I think it will run Sierra as-is without any hacks (not 100% sure though, I'm still running El Cap on mine.) I don't understand your question re Adobe Acrobat; I'd expect that the right place to get it is from adobe.com, were you looking for a different answer?

MS Word doesn't include photoshop, perhaps you were thinking of PowerPoint? That iMac will run Mac Pages, which can print to PDF's which are a common format. (Of course, if your targeted publisher will only take Word, like some I know of, you are stuck.) Pages is OK, its two main advantages are a) it's not Word, and b) it's reasonably predictable so the "wtf is it doing NOW?" factor is much lower. The other non-Word alternative I can think of is LibreOffice which I have no experience of on a Mac.

I'm afraid I have no idea about your yahoo mail question.

Mac-to-mac transfer can be done various ways. If they are both on the same local network, probably one of the simplest is to enable File Sharing (via System Preferences, Sharing) and simply mount one machine's filesystem on the other one. (Finder, Go, Connect-To-Server.) You can then copy files over with Finder drag-and-drop. Another way is Target Disk Mode which makes one Mac look like a disk drive to another. Google is your friend.

IMO the most likely killer of your new(old) iMac is its hard drive. Consider replacing it with an el cheapo SATA SSD, which is relatively easy to do on the 2009's. 8 Gb memory and an SSD, and that machine should be good for a few more years, barring catastrophic failure.

[doublepost=1494767902][/doublepost]Thanks for the reply. You're right, I meant PowerPoint. Not enough coffee. Adobe is now loaded, and I plan to upgrade to 8GB and change to a SATA SSD hard drive.

There are a lot of e-mails that I need to keep, too many to just print off. Maybe someone else has an idea?

Thanks again!

 

[Fishrrman]

A 2009 iMac in good condition for $100 is certainly a "good deal".

You didn't tell us which version of the OS is installed on it.

For Acrobat, I'd download it from Adobe's site.
Caution: if you're using an older version of the OS, you -might- need a previous version of Acrobat to be compatible. Just something to be aware of.

For word processing, you might consider a previous version of "Pages" from iWork.
Or, you can download "LibreOffice" for free. Again, which version you need depends on which OS you're using.
Office 2004 might be too old, but you could try it. If the install works, ok, if it doesn't, just trash it.
Have you looked at Nisus Writer? I think they have an "Express" version, also.

Insofar as RAM goes, you might "go up" to 8gb.
Or if you don't want to spend that much, try 4gb instead. Unless you're into editing video, it should do "well enough".

You can copy over the emails from the g5 and then import them into Mail on the 2009.
Mail.app should be able to handle this.
You'll have to dig and find out where they are in your home folder (this may change from one version of the OS to the next).

I'd use an external drive or USB flash drive to move the files. Easier than using a cable.

There are some 3rd party utilities that can help with moving email.
"Emailchemy" comes to mind.

 

[Christine1234]

A 2009 iMac in good condition for $100 is certainly a "good deal".

You didn't tell us which version of the OS is installed on it.

For Acrobat, I'd download it from Adobe's site.
Caution: if you're using an older version of the OS, you -might- need a previous version of Acrobat to be compatible. Just something to be aware of.

For word processing, you might consider a previous version of "Pages" from iWork.
Or, you can download "LibreOffice" for free. Again, which version you need depends on which OS you're using.
Office 2004 might be too old, but you could try it. If the install works, ok, if it doesn't, just trash it.
Have you looked at Nisus Writer? I think they have an "Express" version, also.

Insofar as RAM goes, you might "go up" to 8gb.
Or if you don't want to spend that much, try 4gb instead. Unless you're into editing video, it should do "well enough".

You can copy over the emails from the g5 and then import them into Mail on the 2009.
Mail.app should be able to handle this.
You'll have to dig and find out where they are in your home folder (this may change from one version of the OS to the next).

I'd use an external drive or USB flash drive to move the files. Easier than using a cable.

There are some 3rd party utilities that can help with moving email.
"Emailchemy" comes to mind.

Thanks, you've given me some good ideas here. I didn't know about Emailchemy or Nisus Writer. I'll check those out.

The computer is in really good condition, and running OS 10.11.6.

The specs sheets I saw mentioned that you can go up to 8GB of RAM on the other iMac 09 models, but didn't mention it on the sheet for the one sold for education, which is what I have. That's why I questioned it, but it looks like it can be done. That's good news.