OS X Java & Mail conflicts

[smsgt178]

I am 69 years old. Back in the mid 80’s, I was forced to learn computing as part of my responsibilities as an Air Force manager. We were originally taught MS-DOS, migrating to Windows 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 95 and 98. Now don’t misinterpret my expertise. We only learned the basics and any improvement upon that has been accomplished on my own. I am by far, not an expert with computers. I consider myself as having average knowledge, but only with the Microsoft operating systems. Since the mid 90’s, I’ve been quite interested in the Apple (Macintosh) computers. My wife and I are now both retired, but use a computer daily for email, socializing, research and playing online games. A few months ago, after 25 years of desiring an Apple, I purchased a refurbished iMac G5 (iSight). It came pre-installed with OS X 10.4.11 (Tiger). We both like the smoothness of operation, fast boots and excellent graphics. Learning the Mac OS X has been somewhat daunting, but we’re excited and willing to put forth the effort. However, there have been a couple of disappointments with our new endeavor. The first and foremost has been problems with playing POGO.com games. Any game requiring JAVA will not load, thus you cannot play it. We first thought it might be a situation with Safari, so we downloaded and tried Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Camino. All had the same problem. We’ve contacted support at Pogo several times, but their suggestions were no help. We’ve read several Mac forums, tried many suggested remedies and the problem still remains. We have made sure (several times) we have then latest Java version for our OS X installed correctly. Games utilizing Adobe Flash work fine, only those requiring Java are the problem. The second problem has been with OS X Mail. Only one situation gives us trouble. Sending email. Originally, we could receive, but not send. After several communications with our ISP and Mac forums, we were able to get Mail to send, but it’s been extremely slow. After fighting these shortfalls for several weeks, I purchased and clean installed 10.5.8 (Leopard). After installation, updates, etc…… the same two problems still exist. We are at a loss as to what to do next. These problems do not exist with our other PC’s. Actually, with using Windows PC’s for so many years, I have never come up against a problem I could not solve and fix. But with our iMac, we are stumped and don’t know what to do next. I would really like for the both of us to continue our complete migration into the Apple world, but these two problems are roadblocks we’d like to eliminate.