Acrobat

I will be using this machine for heavy use of QX v3.3, AI 8.0 and PS 5.0 as well as Acrobat 4.0, MS Office. ...

This is on a 400mghz Ti Powerbook with 384 megs of ram, and surprisingly enough, ran pretty decently: Netscape 6.1 Preview Release Entourage (classic) Terminal UltraDev (classic) BBedit 6.12 Fireworks (classic) Calculator Stuffit Expander 6.5

Hold on one moment please. I do believe we are on a Mac forum, and the only time a "Problem" is "solved" is when there is a Mac solution. I don't want to use Office, so I can have free viewers if I move to Windows? Where is the solution in that? I work with publications firms that live buy QuarkXPress (which is too expensive to begin with), and need to (from time to time) open...

This one is easy:use Office. Like it or not, it's more or less standard now. Unless you simply do not communicate with any other computer users, it is the most pragmatic option. The next issue is whether to upgrade or not. Most people will not NEED the new X features (me included), but may want it just for the new look and to avoid Classic altogether (again, me included)....

Noticed that most of your apps are very common on Carracho, and Carracho is on your list. Carracho is not exactly the most reliable source for clean apps or OS's. I'm not saying your pirating software, but I would wager on the side that you probably are like everyone else here. You might want to consider your methods before you start pointing fingers at Apple. For all we know...

Actually AppleWorks should be able to read and write most Office docs (specially Office 97 format if it is coming from a Windows system). I do have a copy of Office 98, but only use it on a few occations. But this brings up an important point though. Why do we have to pay so much money for apps just to read docs from them? Why pay $900 for QuarkXPress if you don't actually...

I tried to start up 13 very light apps like preview, processor view , Acrobat....etc no problem. ....but half of the apps that I mentioned before are heavy apps and are sitting on different partitions.....

I just launched 13 apps all at once no problem at all Terminal ProcessViewer Address Book Transmit TextEdit Sherlock Acrobat Reader 5.0 OmniWeb

Media Player functions just like the OS 9 version except it's native. It is nothing close to the windows version, but it plays asf media (Microsoft media format) very well. It totally leverages the power of OS X. As a matter of fact i have a 308k stream playin in it as well as music in itunes, Office burning in toast, a terminal shell running "top" @ .75 sec intervals, AIM,...

Soapvox - your statement that Adobe develops for Wintel first and then ports to Mac is wrong. Adobe now writes more than 80% of their code so it is platform portable, meaning it can be ported to either platform with little to no effort. The remaining 20% or so is the platform specific code that each app needs to address platform specific issues (widgets, open/save dialog...