I am surprised to read that your Mac is photophobic, although you did say "old Mac." If you want to look at images in the U.S. Patent Office web site, you can't use a PC, you have to use a Mac. I don't know why, they explain it on their site, but the explanation reads like "the only software that will work runs on a Mac, sorry, if anyone knows about some better software, please email us." Grrrr.
As for printers, I've got printers out the ying-yang - so to speak. Two very high-end HP 4000 that print 17 pages per minute, one at the office, one in the home office. A fairly nice HP color deskjet that I could use to print out color images, but the kids seem to use much more than I do. It makes their homework really spiffy, and their teachers rave and give them A's. I've posted about feeling guilty because poor kids don't have that advantage. On the field trip Wednesday, Nick's teacher was raving about his computer skills, she stopped me twice to tell me about a school I should take a look at for him. I've got two scanners, one with a feeder for text, and a flat bed one for color images - the text one is at the office, it's small, the flat bed actually does text better but it's big. And then some old printers that I bought a while ago that have been eclipsed by the new ones, my mother is using one.
Your kids will need a printer for school. I let mine start playing with my computer when they were three or four - bought them kid games but of course that was about ten years ago, they are out of date now. As for computers, the local schools use Macs, until high school, then in the programming classes they use PCs. |
