PowerPC Applications are no longer supported since Lion was installed

On the side: if you are going to buy a new mbp: be aware that the new ones are delivered with OS Lion, and the hardware is (unavoidably) different from the older hardware, so that installing Snow leopard can give a lot of trouble: buy an somewhat older MBP refurbished with Snow Leopard.

Get an older Mac from one of these resources*:

http://www.macmaps.com/usedrefurbished.html

The bottom of https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-2455 tells you which ones work with Snow Leopard. As long as they are Core2Duo, Xeon, or better, they will work with both Lion and Snow Leopard. You can partition your machine or add an external hard drive, or in the case of a Mac Pro, a second hard drive with a different operating system. Partitioning requires wiping the hard drive and is described here:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61301

Never thought of writing the textbooks but that would take too much time that I don't have lol. I'm a happy nursing student again. What I did was partition my hard drive and install Leopard on it. It was very easy to do and I was surprised takes little room on my drive to do. I now can load either Lion for normal use or Leopard when I have a CD I need to use for school. I do A LOT of questions from NCLEX books and from the CD's that accompany the textbooks to study so carrying my macbook instead of 10 books is so much easier. Now I'm off to study again 🙂

I feel the pain as well as a NURSING student! gahh. i just went to put in my jarvis physical assessment CD and nothing.. all of these books have costs me thousands.. and none of their CDs are any good to me now.. **** them or **** mac lol.. how annoying

Well you should contact the developers who wrote the software behind those books and tell them they had 6 years to make their software native to the new Macs that came on the block. And that for the money you spent, you desire a full refund for their CDs not being able to be used with the most modern Macs.

Jarvis books e-mail contact ehswebmaster AT elsevier.com

a brody - yes quite right, it's the developers im annoyed at.. not so much mac.. geez these people need to make sure their 2 sometimes 300 books have adequate companians.

Thanks for the link

A simple though not perfect solution would be Lion Servier running Snow Leopard client VMs that would run Rosetta in their own little sandbox.

Some listened to planning, found that the Carbon transition from OS 9 days to OS X, led to a dead end. Adobe faced a huge task to become a full 64-bit OS X native Cocoa based.

Even the transition from the G5 to Mac Pro and Intel had some bumps. A Mac Pro with more than 2GB RAM 'broke' drivers (ATTO UL5D) and there are same stories with every new OS, let alone changes in hardware even when the "processor" is still Intel but adapting drivers, software to work properly (Nehalem and HT broke a number of applications that had to be redone recompliled reoptimized).

Kennbu wrote: Please tell me that I am doing something wrong here and Apple is not costing me a fortune in new software.

Um, sorry, but you did something wrong by not researching Lion's failings before you installed it. None of your older software will work on Lion. However, if you are little clever you can install Snow Leopard using BootCamp to create a partition. If you want Snow Leopard as your main OS just create a huge partition. Just open BootCamp, create the partition and then quit it. Then open the disc utility and reformat the partition as OSX Extended, stick your Snow Leopard disc in the drive and go for it.

you do not want or need Boot Camp (Assistant).

Disk Utilty will do just fine.

But we are talking a Mac with 4 internal drive bays.

Ideal: clean install Lion and leave 10.6.8 drive 'well enough alone' you can import with Setup Assistant later.

And have your dual or triple boot.