You could mount it on the wall behind a panel that says, "In case of emergency, break glass."

And speaking of Macs.

I finally began setting up my new (to me) eMac, despite not yet adding new memory. I will do that soonish.

My immediate need:

Consider me a clean slate. Never used OSX before. (have only 10.1.4 until the upgrade)

What browser and email programs should I be using? (Cheap suggestions will be given the most weight...or rather, suggestions for cheap products vs. simply cheap talk.)

Also: Is it worthwhile the upgrade from Office 2001 to work in OSX or is the Classic environment just fine...which is what I suspect.

(off to walk the pooch, so if anyone is around, I'll respond in about a half hour. Thanks in advance for any thoughts.)

Firefox is good, but it uses a lot of RAM, so you might not want to use it unti you get more RAM installed. I haven't really used IE for the Mac, so I can't comment on that. Apple's Safari browser is good for older Macs, as it's faster than Mozilla and uses less memory.

not gone yet

I've got IE up now and it seems okay. But I'd really like to join the Firefox appreciators, so that's one more reason to push through the upgrade.

As for email programs. Mail seems pretty funtionality free, but it plays nice with OSX. Outlook only seems to work in Classic, which for some reason doesn't seem to like my Verizon connection.

Fuss and Bother!

Beej-- Mail plays well with Address Book and iCal to gice you most of the Outlook functionality. iCal is very pretty.

Oooh. iCal IS pretty.

What I really need, though, is nicely formatted email messages.

I send inquiries about fees and programs in a template that looks a bit like my web page.

Am I missing that functionality in Mail?

switching over to Mail for a sec to see

eta: ::hangs head in shame over asking a question before fully exploring the options::

Hmph. Only text color in Mail. No background. Email product question still stands.

Hmm. I've never explored the possibility of Mail using HTML messages... I know they generally prefer the rich text thing as HTML email provides the possibility of much viruses and things, but if you really need the background thing then you're probably out of luck. Too bad, too, as Mail is so beautifully simple, with excellent spam filtering.

If you upgrade Office, Entourage seems to be pretty nice, very Outlook-like, even though Office itself gives me the willies in OS X. You could also consider trying Thunderbird, the (free) email client by the people that do Firefox. But that, too, would probably want a memory upgrade, and I'm not certain about it's HTML mail possibilities. And it, unfortunately, does not interact with iCal to my knowledge.

Consumer Reports is completely untrustworthy on food reviews; their tasters' opinions never match mine.

Thanks for the tips Nova. I'll look into them as soon as I finish job #1--the all important memory upgrade.

While this updating process is not as easy as I'd like it to be, I have to say I'm really happy to have this new 'puter.

The screen is so, so nice! (Makes my no-tv-watchin' iMac obsession a bit dimmed tho'. Job #2 will be the external dvd drive!)

Beej, if you decide you like Firefox, the same outfit has a mail app. called Thunderbird [link]

There is a feature list in the next to last paragraph on that page, and it includes "support for HTML mail."

eta: Ooops, NovaChild beat me to it. I saw "Office" and "Outlook" in his second paragraph so I skipped to the next message.