Newbie query regarding Adobe CS2 on G3 iMac

You can try it when it comes I guess but assuming it will run it might be unusable slow..

Does the gift iMac have a DVD drive? I hope so because OS 10.4 comes on DVDs, not CDs.

What are the specs on the iMac? Under the Apple menu at the left end of the menu bar, choose Apple System Profiler. There, you can find:

Processor speed
RAM installed
size of hard drive (from System Profiler's "volumes and devices" tab)

There are a lot of iMac G3 variants; the later ones are still rather capable machines. Posting your machine's specs will help people help you.

Thanks for posting the extra information.

The only thing that gives me heartburn is the size of the hard drive, especially as you want to run CS. That plus the OS can eat a huge amount of the free space.

OSX needs a certain amount of fee space--the more the better--to efficiently use its Virtual Memory (VM) system. The X version of VM cannot be turned off as it can in OS9. CS, especially PhotoShop, will need room for its own scratch disk function. I'm afraid a 10G hard drive is not going to give you much joy under those conditions, even if you do a minimum install of OSX to maximum space.

Fortunately, adding larger drive to this model is a 10-30 minute job depending on your skill and nervousness levels. We have the identical model; when our daughter needed a computer fast, I pulled the iMac 400 out of storage, replaced the 10GB drive with a low-mileage 60G I had left over from another project, popped in a fresh PRAM battery, and installed Panther. The hard drive swap took only about ten minutes even though I'd never worked inside an iMac before. I also had the joy of being able to install Panther to a perfectly clean volume.

Now she has a competent computer that only needs more RAM (I did not have any extra PC100 RAM lying about). For her needs--mostly surfing and e-mail--it's fine like it is, but she may get RAM for Christmas.

You can install a parallel ATA (or PATA) drive up to 120GB is size. Those size drives are rapidly falling in price. Even going to a 40G version would by you a lot of performance.

I have used Adobe Photoshop CS2 on my Machine and it is incredibly slow - and that is on a G4 with 1GB Ram! I reverted back to CS (v1) and all works perfectly snappy.

In Adobe CS2 the File-Browser has been replaced with Adobe Bridge, so it always runs a seperate app in the background, maybe its because of that.

The fastest Photoshop for old macs would be Photoshop 7 ( or the equivalent "Elements 2.0" ) which runs on OS9 and on OSX too.

Let's not forget that the edition of OSX also is a matter .. Tiger eats up more Ram and has lots of bloated unneeded stuff in it than Jaguar or Panther.

So if you must run CS2 than be cautious and don't expect wonders. Max out the Ram for OSX sake and don't run more than the Finder in background.

I'd be inclined to support this last post. PS7 is going to be the most workable version on this iMac. But as is mentioned earlier, your HD is going to be too small.