I've been having some Serious Problems with Photoshop on my G4 Digital Audio. The major issue is that the machine's a complete slug running 5.5 in Classic on OS X, though this week that age-old gripe has taken a backseat to the fact that Photoshop CS is crashing like a crackwhore trying to deliver a blowjob in the midst of withdrawal. This started last night as a repeated load-then-crash on a document I was working on, which I worked around by loading the app first, then loading the file. I was able to work on it easily for some time, until it came time to convert the document from Greyscale to RGB color. CS crashed. Then it crashed again. Then it locked the machine. Reboot, retry, lock. Reboot. Do the conversion and flat colors in Photoshop 5.5 running in Classic - the RGB convert occured instantly - and save off. No problems.

Try the file in CS again this morning and the machine hard-locks again. Good thing the G4DA has a really convenient reset button - none of this "hold down power until the machine feels like Stopping" crap. This is exceedingly Odd behaviour for CS, which has functioned fairly well whenever I've needed it, which isn't often. I'm assuming this has something to do with the processor upgrade I administered in January, but I can't imagine what, as everything else is fine. The last time everything went crash-happy (halo, wolfenstein, photoshop, Classic, everything-but-the-OS), I straightened things out by flipping the dip switches down to 1.33 ghz from the Factory Default of 1.4. Still better than 733, especially for Photoshop.... though I had to remove the Altivec Core for Photoshop 5.5 to prevent it from Disappearing from memory whenever I ran anything that had been G4-accellerated. Gayness.

This recent crash-happiness has me thinking about doing a full ground-up reinstall and rebuild of Minerva. It also had me thinking about buying a Mac Mini, despite the fact it's a single-head machine and the same speed as Minerva, as I'd rather have an equivalent box that fucking works than a beefed out piece of kit that doesn't, and the Mini is the only thing in my price range. I don't have - and couldn't possibly aquire - the two grand I'd need for a G5 (more like six grand if I'm going to do it right, which would be a g5, at least 2g of ram, scanner, monitor, tablet, and a PC to plug into the other KVM slot for 3d purposes).

Right on cue, Apple Intels the Mini, which drops it right out of the running as an option. I need Classic. As annoying as this is, certain quirks in Photoshop CS handling - currently the fact that it kicks Minerva in the balls every time I try to do something with it - have me pretty irked about the future direction of the Mac platform.