Mac Newbie asking for some advice...

[The_good_guy]

Well I wasnt sure where I should have posted this.. so mods please move this teh right place.

My girlfriend is a mac user and while it frustrates her to hell I have to deal with that side of things when things dont work. I want to upgrade or reinstall her operatings system. Things are not running right and certain applications run out of memory (Word, AIM).

Presently she is running a PowerBook 300Mhz (its that black powerbook with a white apple logo on it), 192MB ram, 8 Gb hdd.

Her present version is OS 9.2.x (not sure if the .1 is there or not but I know its 9.2).

I was thinking of going to OSX.2, I love the jaguar look at the apple store and if I had teh money I would buy one just for that slick interface (plus I am a unix guy of sorts).

So question is will OS10.2 or even 10.1 work on her system? I can get a copy of 10.1 to test out from a classmate of hers (she is still on 9.2 but is also thinking of upgrading - so I have access to her upgrade disc if needed - hers is an Ibook at 600mhz and it came with it). I have asked my gf to find her OS9.2 just in case something goes wrong.

I am totally clueless on how to get aroudn to it. First is there any sort of registration on the OS? (like winblows). I am not even sure if the OSX will run on her system. I talked to a few people at the apple store and they too were a bit ansy over it. They said it will run but it would run slow (well duh!).

Assuming I do install one of the OS's. HOwe do i backup the stuff. I only know she has the OS9.2 cd on her (she isnt sure where the other app cd's like OfficeX (I assume she is running that) is.)
I know that microsoft just dumps the office programs in one location so just burning it and restoring it to the location would be satisfactory to get that program running. But what about others?

And even if I do reinstall.. how do I go about it? I am sure there are some special keys in there. I know hitting "C" at boot will boot from cdrom. But what else is there. My old Series II toaster is jack and I have forgotten how to work on a mac. But if she gets OSX then I might think of buying the cheapest mac out there to play with.

Thanks

TGG

[Cat]

I had OS X and then Jaguar on my iBook@366MHz 192MB Ram for quite some time: it runs, but it's slow. Especially big programs like Word are noticeably slow.
I asked the sysadmin of my faculty to backup my data during the upgrade, I made a complete backup of my entire drive, just in case ... then I repartitioned my HD and installed OS 9 on one partition and OS X on the other. This gave me the advantage of being able to test and learn OS X while still having access to OS 9, because I could boot in both (holding the ALT/Option key at stratup will bring up a screen in which you can choose between any bootable partition or disk).

I can't remember needing to register OS X ...

Hope this helps ...

I think OS X is a great improvement over OS 9. You might want to wait for the latest version (10.3), because OS X is still growing and getting better and better with each release. Anyway I strongly advise you to install 10.2 and the latest patches, since they will run faster and more stable than 10.1.

Good luck!