Quick bit of advice needed please guys.

 

I have spent the last several months scrutinising numerous books on coding and web design and I now would like to take things further by developing a portfolio to showcase my shiny new skills.

 

I have an old Dell precision M50 laptop on its last legs running on XP with Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash MX, Photoshop CS2 & Adobe Illustrator CS. I have been using this machine to practise and experiment.

I would look to buy a new one in the future for about £700-£800.

 

However, stored away collecting dust I have an Apple Powermac G5 1.8 Dual desktop machine. This is not an intel machine so it would provide more testing problems for my pages.

How would I test on browers like Internet Exporer?

This machine has Photoshop, Illustrator but no Dreamweaver etc.

I have learnt to hand code so have become accustomed to using Dreamweaver code view and would prefer to use this than wordpad etc so I would consider buying this for the mac if i chose this option.

 

What would you guys do in my position? It seems a waste that the mac would go to waste through its lack of use. ( I have had it from new for over 3 years & its had about 6 months of use). I have considered selling it but due to its age ( and clumsy removal men damaging the casing) but i think i could gain more from keeping it than selling it.

 

Many thanks for your help

Quick bit of advice needed please guys.

 

I have spent the last several months scrutinising numerous books on coding and web design and I now would like to take things further by developing a portfolio to showcase my shiny new skills.

 

I have an old Dell precision M50 laptop on its last legs running on XP with Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash MX, Photoshop CS2 & Adobe Illustrator CS. I have been using this machine to practise and experiment.

I would look to buy a new one in the future for about £700-£800.

 

However, stored away collecting dust I have an Apple Powermac G5 1.8 Dual desktop machine. This is not an intel machine so it would provide more testing problems for my pages.

How would I test on browers like Internet Exporer?

This machine has Photoshop, Illustrator but no Dreamweaver etc.

I have learnt to hand code so have become accustomed to using Dreamweaver code view and would prefer to use this than wordpad etc so I would consider buying this for the mac if i chose this option.

 

What would you guys do in my position? It seems a waste that the mac would go to waste through its lack of use. ( I have had it from new for over 3 years & its had about 6 months of use). I have considered selling it but due to its age ( and clumsy removal men damaging the casing) but i think i could gain more from keeping it than selling it.

 

Many thanks for your help

 

Keep the G5! Don't worry about its old processor - my G4 was the best computer I ever used (till it died). As far as testing goes, keep your XP machine. If you are really set on only having one machine, you can use netrenderer to see a snapshot of your pages in IE 6, 7 & 8.

Don't worry about not having dreamweaver - I always used Smultron & Taco HTML Editor for my coding, and found them both to be very reliable.

You could also look into the possibility of running VMWare so that you can use windows on top of your mac OS (I'm doing this on my linux machine - it's a bit slow, but invaluable for testing).

If you do decide to sell the G5 - PM me with the price! Seriously...

Many thanks for your reply and decent advice notbansky!

 

I checked out those editors you suggested, they look better than i expected so will definately be giving those a go.

 

I will probably make a final decision on the G5 within the next month or so I will most definately keep you in mind.

 

Cheers