[OT] Mac JPEG viewer advice

[Mark Fowler]

On 29 Sep 2007, at 15:03, Andrew Black wrote:

> My other half has been sucked into giving advice to her mother who  
> has an iMac. Nether of us are familiar with Macs.  We are not quite  
> sure of the model number, think it is about 4 years old.

With Mac OS 9 installed?  At least bought back in 2002, probably  
older.  Is it one of the G3 ones (i.e. looks like a TV with a CD  
drive under it, not like a lamp or a very thick flat panel LCD display)

> She wants a viewer for digital photos.  iPhoto (AFAIK) need MacOS X.
> (side issue - is that normally pronounced "ex" or "ten". Suspect it  
> is a deliberate ambiguity)

Officially it's "Mac OS ten".  Everyone in the world pronouces it  
"Mac OS exs".

> The Mac is running:
> Mac OS 9.0.4 Deutsch
>
> Here's some memory info
> Volume cache 1984KB
> Vitueller speicher 100MB
> Arbeitsspeicher 64MB

Ouch.  64MB main memory

My camera produces ~1MB JPEG images, and JPEGs normally compress  
about 50-1.  This means they'll take 50MB of main memory just to  
uncompress the image.  Where's the OS going to fit?

I'd recommend a new computer.

Mark.