TDadio wrote:
I downloaded the upgrade from the internet, so I don't have a disk. I was never prompted to run Rosetta. What is Rosetta?
Your lack of specifics is confusing the heck out of the many valuable resources available to you here.
Here is what I gleen from your posts: You have a MacBook that was running Tiger or Leopard and you upgraded it to Snow Leopard. You were able to accomplish this feat without having a permanent copy of the Snow Leopard Install DVD (borrowed perhaps?).
You upgraded Snow Leopard to 10.6.8 online.
You now want to run your copy of Microsoft Office 2004 and of course you are getting the dreaded cannot run powerpc applications prompt.
1. What is Rosetta? From the mid-1990's to 2006, Macs ran on the PowerPC CPU platform,which was a competitor to the Intel platform. In 2005, Apple announced its migration in 2006 to the Intel platform.
Rather than make its users replace all of their current PPC software, Apple licensed technology from a third party company that transparently emulated the PPC routines on the new Intel Macs; Apple named it Rosetta. It was a minor miracle: customers could continue to run their software libraries (for the most part) and yet purchase new software that ran native in Intel.
Unfortunately, Apple's license to this underlying technology expired with the introduction of Lion and thereafter. Since most users of PPC software did not even know they were operating under emulation, they did not discover this fact until their unfortunate upgrade to Lion or now Mountain Lion.
2. You however are content to continue to run Snow Leopard. However, in Snow Leopard, installing Rosetta was an optional feature during the installation process, BEFORE upgrade.
Earlier, upon attempting to open a PPC application, Apple would allow you to install Rosetta from the internet. This feature seems to have been abandoned by Apple at this time.
Hence you need access to a "retail" copy of the Snow Leopard Install DVD to run the Optional Rosetta Install feature. Either borrow it again, or call Apple and purchase a copy: you can still purchase a copy from Apple's online store's telesales agents [1-800-MY-APPLE (1-800-692-7753)] or Customer Service and Sales Support at 1-800-676-2775 (ask for a Sales Representative).
