Recommended (or not recommended) by Philip Grosset or other people who would like to contribute.

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CONTENTS

1.Visioneer PaperPortVx scanner
2. RAM Doubler
3. Wacom ArtPad II
4. GifBuilder
5. Canon Lide 20 scanner
6. Mac OS X 10.2 and 10.3
7. Epson Stylus Photo 790
8. Macintosh G3 PowerPC
9. Sportster Flash modem
10.Norton Anti Virus, Virex. and Virus Barrier
11. iMac
12. Adobe Photoshop
13. Canon i850 printer



1. VISIONEER PAPERPORT Vx SCANNER. A very small desktop scanner which produced black & white electronic images of photos, letters, newspaper clippings etc. All this was claimed to lead to the paperless office, but I suspect that written copies might prove rather safer!

I bought it largely so that I could reproduce b & w photos in a family newsletter, and it could do this reasonably well when used in conjunction with a photo-editing program (I used PhotoFix). However, I'm afraid it gave me a lot of trouble with my Mac Performa 630 because it produced lines down every scanned picture. Its first replacement didn't work properly either: very often the scanner either wouldn't allow me to feed anything into it, or it started running as soon as the computer was switched on, then continued switching itself on and off so that I ended up with a series of partly scanned black areas. In the end, I could only use it by slipping a photo in when it was first switched on and started running for no apparent reason- then I had to struggle to turn it off by pressing either command-period, or by pressing the button on the side of the scanner, or by doing both! When I could persuade it to work, it produced reasonable quality b&w reproductions - but it was highly unreliable.

I must have reloaded the program over six times (following the advice of Visioneer's technical support dept which, for customers in the UK is inconveniently based in Amsterdam, but available for the price of a London call), but found in the end that the fault persisted even with all other extensions and control panels turned off. Eventually, I read on Visioneer's technical support site (you can find this via their Home Page at: http://www.visioneer.com/ ) a query from someone else with a similar problem who was told that the scanner was faulty and should be returned. As mine was still just within its one year guarantee period, I sent it back to the dealer, who diagnosed a faulty sensor and returned it to the importer. In ten days time, I received another replacement which, for ten months, worked fine. Visioneer's technical support people should have told me to return it long ago - but my own UK mail-order dealer (Gordon Harwood of Alfreton in Derbyshire) handled it all with great efficiency once I'd returned it to him.
I also got a SCSI adapter for it, so was able to run it from the Mac's SCSI port (instead of the modem or printer port), which is a great convenience. (SCSI stands for Small Computer Systems Interface, and is pronounced scuzzy.) But I continued labelling its icon with the sad looking image on the right as a reminder of all I'd been through!

However, after ten months, it started producing two white smudgy lines from top to bottom of the scanned picture, one down the centre and the other down the right. Recalibrating it made no difference - nor did cleaning the scanner head with a fax type page cleaner as recommended in the instructions. So I could only use it by confining photos to the left-hand side of the scanner page. I also found it led to problems with extensions clashes. So, unlike all those enthusiastic reviewers in the computer press, I can't really recommend the Paperport. A pity, because, when it worked properly, it seemed quite quick and efficient.

2. RAM DOUBLER. This is a most useful utility (for the older Mac) as it effectively doubles the amount of RAM available by shuffling around the RAM contents. So I found I was just able to use Navigator 3.0 with my (8Mb RAM) Performa 630. It works quite automatically and is most effective when more than one application is in use. The latest version, Ram Doubler 2, triples available RAM. Highly recommended, although in the end I found I still needed to buy extra RAM.

3. WACOM ARTPAD II. A very useful alternative to a mouse that takes up no more space than a mouse pad. The pressure sensitive pen has a switch on the side which can be set so that a single click on it acts in the same way as a double click on the mouse, which makes it easier to use than the mouse (that I don't use any more). The only snag is that is a light grey, and if you put it down somewhere other than in the special holder provided, it is not always easy to find it again! So I wrapped a narrow strip of red paper around mine. It is mainly intended, of course, for drawing, and came conveniently packed with Dabbler II, an ingenious paint program, although not, as is sometimes claimed, one that will actually teach you how to draw!
It was subsequently replaced by the Wacom graphire pad, that comes complete not only with a pen but with its own mouse that can only be used on the pad. This pad works very well, and you don't need to use the mouse (that isn't so impressive) if you don't want to. Highly recommended.

4. GIFBUILDER O.5. This is free shareware for the Macintosh that allows you to produce animated gif images like the spinning ball shown here. GifBuilder is certainly ingenious and effective, but I did not find the instructions too easy to understand, and it can easily be overused. The Windows equivalent is GifConstructor Set. Both are available from: http://www.shareware.com/

5. CANON LIDE 20 SCANNER. A very easily operated, conveniently small, and inexpensive scanner, but you need Photoshop 7 before it will run on Mac OS X native, with which it then works very well. However the three buttons on the front (scan, copy and email) don't work with Mac OS X, but, even so, I still think it's a good buy. It also has an ingenious multi-scan function allowing you to feed in several photos at the same time, but get separate images of each. Recommended.

6. MAC OS X 10.2 (pronounced Mac OS ten point two, but also called Jaguar) and MAC OS X 10.3 (Panther).
Was Jaguar worth the money? Well, it certainly looked better, was rather easier to use, and no longer crashed the whole computer when a particular program went down. There were no extensions so no extension conflicts, and no need to allocate memory to programs as it did this automatically. If you moved up from an older version, old applications may not have worked. Installing it gave me a few problems, but it was well worth the effort. I particularly liked the new mail program which dealt with junk mail very much more effectively than any other system I've used. However, I found that accessing iDisk (part of the over-charged .Mac service) was painfully slow, even compared with what it had been with Mac OS.9. It was sometimes taking as long as 2 minutes to transfer a single file, even when using cable broadband in the UK. The answer I found from a .Mac discussion group was to use the freeware Goliath (from http://www.webdav.org/goliath/). This accomplished the transfer in just a few seconds. I suggested to Apple that they should incorporate it in their program! Even with it, though, it's not nearly as convenient as ftp access, so I moved my photography website to a cheaper and better home with ntl (my service provider), where there's 55MB of free webspace so plenty of room for all three of my sites.
I subsequently moved on to Panther which solves the iDisk problem by having a copy of it permanently available on your computer that automatically updates the remote iDisk (but I've given up my .Mac membership so no longer have access to it) and offers some useful improved services (fast switching, iChat AV and faxing etc) to simplify tasks for professional users. The changes for the home user (such as the new finder) seem more cosmetic. But I'm still glad to have it! The upgrade from Jaguar proved quite painless and I didn't lose any of my existing settings or programs, except for Norton Personal Firewall 2 that would no longer load up (over the years, I've had quite a few problems with Norton programs. They seem expensive and slow to update). So now I'm using Panther's built-in firewall that seems to work fine - except that there's no way of allowing ftp access to selected sites (like this one) while refusing access to others.

7. EPSON STYLUS PHOTO 790 COLOUR PRINTER. At first I found this a very impressive, comparatively inexpensive, A4 inkjet printer with very clear instructions so I was able to get it running remarkably quickly. It produced really good quality colour prints. The snag was the cost of cartridges. (If you want cheaper cartridges in the UK, try a mail order firm of which the cheapest I've found is PhotoGlossy.) However, after 18 months use, I found that some text was coming out faint, and repeated head cleaning only led to black smears on the top edge and back of the paper. So I moved to a Canon i850 printer - a real improvement.

8. MAC G3 POWER PC. 233 MHz. In March 1998, I passed on my old Performa 630 to my son. It had served me well, but lacked the ever-increasing memory and speed I found I needed. The big question was whether or not to go for another Mac.
Apple always seems to be in financial trouble and its long term future in doubt, but I've learned to find my way around a Mac, and it's excellently suited to the webpage and newsletter work (involving lots of photos) for which I want to use it. So I took the plunge and decided to stick with it. There's also the important fact that I can go on using old files and programs without any problems. The only snag was that I found I hadn't backed up three of the images on this website onto floppy disk (but as there are over 200 items on it, this perhaps wasn't too surprising!). However I was able to get the missing pictures back from the server via Fetch (a really excellent FTP program for Macs).
I was very pleased with the G3 and the 64 RAM (actually SDRAM) that I'd ordered with it (the extra RAM was well worth the comparatively slight extra cost) The accompanying literature made setting up quite easy, although you had to go on-screen for the full handbook. The increased speed was the first thing I noticed. Instead of waiting 10-15 minutes to scan several photos, it had finished the job in a minute or so, before I'd even left my seat to make the usual cup of tea! And I could work from several of the programs I wanted at the same time, instead of constantly running out of memory. The keyboard was a bit spongy, but the computer itself was a big improvement on my old Performa 630. It ended up costing me almost as much as the previous machine had done some four years earlier, but I got very much more for my money. However, after three years, the hard drive packed up on me, and I moved to an iMac, that I can thoroughly recommend.

9. SPORTSTER FLASH MODEM. I had to replace my Motorola 3400 modem because it used a chip that was incompatible with the Ascend Max modems used by my then service provider (Globalnet). This meant I lost the connection every few minutes. So in its place, I went for a 33.6 Sportster Flash.
I had problems at first in trying to use the MacCom fax/voice software as it kept coming up with the message "No serial access. The modem is not responding". However, I found I could get through to the internet, as long as I switched on the modem after, not before, the computer. If it stuck on "Looking for modem", I found I could get it to make the connection by switching the modem off then on again. The accompanying booklets (the Sportster one ignored Macs entirely) were fairly incomprehensible, and you had to wait quite a time to get an answer on the Robotics UK technical helpline, who suggested that the modem might be faulty. In the end I returned the modem to my supplier (Jigsaw of Nottingham, UK) whose courier collected it the next day and at the same time gave me the replacement - a very impressive service.
I had chosen a Sportster Flash, as the advertising claimed that it could be upgraded as necessary from its website. In fact, US Robotics never introduced a UK version of any upgrade because, they said, the Mac market was too small now that Apple is selling more Macs with built-in modems. They were kind enough to exchange my 33.6 Sportster for one that had been upgraded to v90, but, unless they are going to do this for everyone (and go on doing it whenever necessary!), I cannot really recommend the Sportster for Mac users.

1O. NORTON ANTI VIRUS. There are (comparatively) few viruses on Macs, but it's still wise to take precautions. I've used Norton AntiVirus (which was included with Norton Systemworks but led to problems when using Mac OSX 10.2.6 - see here), Virex (for which I couldn't get the automatic update to work), and Virus Barrier X which seems to work fine without any problems.

11. iMAC. I began with the mid-range 500 MHz G3 model with CD-RW which allowed me to burn my own CD-ROMs, excellent for back-ups of photos etc. I found I could live quite happily without floppy disks, and the USB connections were very convenient - even though it meant a new printer and scanner. It took up conveniently little space, and, as I bought extra RAM, it had as much as 320 RAM and this worked a treat with Mac OS X that I now use almost exclusively. I was very pleased with it.

I've moved on since to a 80GB G4 iMac with 17" flat panel screen, a superdrive that can play and burn DVDs as well as CDs, and (including some extra memory) 520 MB of SDRAM. I can thoroughly recommend it. The 17" screen isn't only ideal for viewing DVD movies but a real boon for everyday use as it gives you so much more space to work on, even allowing you to have two documents side by side. It's really a delight to use. My only (very minor) criticism is that the start up button is hidden round the back of the machine. I make much use of iPhoto, and find iDVD excellent for showing slide shoes with music on an ordinary TV set, using a separate Sony DVD player.

12. ADOBE PHOTOSHOP. I began with version 4 then updated it to 5.5, as this was the cheapest way to get it.I subsequenty updated this to Photoshop 7 then CS (each Photoshop upgrade is a very real advance on the previous version). Photoshop is the photo editing program, and, although very expensive, is also very good. You can see numerous examples of what it can do in the Your Photos section of my Take Better Photos site where I've used it to show suggested modifications to photos that have been sent me for criticism. It isn't at all easy to learn, but you can tackle it bit by bit, learning the most essential bits first. The digital photo magazines are full of illustrated instructions on how to use its various features, and I'd particularly recommend the UK magazine Digital Photo as it includes invaluable movie lessons on how to use Photoshop. If you can't afford or don't really need the full professional Photoshop, go for Photoshop Elements 2, a very good value cut-down version that offers many of its advantages.

13. CANON i850 BUBBLE JET PRINTER. This is the best printer I've had. It's both really fast and quiet, and its 4 separate ink tanks help make it much more economical than my previous Epson printers. Print quality is very good too, thanks to a new micro-nozzle printhead that delivers tiny 2-picolitre droplets. Photos are even up to the sort of quality you might expect with 6 ink printers. It works really well with Mac OS X 10.2 too. Highly recommended.




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