Printers and Games

Question

I am a computer novice who has recently aquired a Apple Mac Mini. I am awaiting the delivery of a monitor. In the meantime, I would appreciate it if somebody would be so kind as to tell me:
a. Whether or not there is an adapter available that would enable me to connect an 8 year old Epson Stylus Color 440 printer to the Mini.
b. Can the Mini play Microsoft programs such as Flight Simulator?
c. Is there any software that will enable me to transfer my MS Works documents from a laptop to the Mini?
Apple Mac Mini   Mac OS X (10.3)   1.42Mhz, 80GB, 512MB RAM

Answer 1

If your computer is a G4 Mini, it won't be able to boot Windows, so you can't run Flight Simulator. You can tell whether it is running Panther from the About This Mac window, that you can access by the Apple Menu (just click on the blue Apple next to the forefront application's name in the Menu Bar at the top of the screen, and then click on About This Mac). It will show you which version of OS X you have, as well as the processor and the amount of RAM, plus the name of the startup disk.
If you are running Panther and that you haven't upgraded your Mac, it probably still has the original 256 MB of RAM. With that amount, your Mini will run X-Plane, but performance will not be great. I believe that the Mini's graphics are also responsible for the fact that it won't play well, but upgrading the RAM to 512 or 1024 MB could improve performance a bit (I will tell you more as soon as I can try 8.40 final), and certianly make your Mac faster in general, especially when multitasking. And in case you can't afford the upgrade, you can try to run an older version of X-Plane (such as v.7 or v.6).
Even if Word can read MS Works files, it doens't mean that the files are Word documents, and unless you get Office:mac (pretty expensive), it is possible that Word-compatible office suites won't be able to read them (in fact, I'm not even sure that Office:mac can read Works documents). However, you can easily convert them with Word . Simply choose to Save As, change the format to Word (.doc) and save (hopefully you don't have too many of them). If it's Word 2003, you will have the possibility to save the document as a Word 2003 document, but to ensure better compatibility with older versions of Office (and, more importantly, with Office alternatives), I recommend that you save them as 1997/2000/XP Word docs.
AppleWorks (should have come with your Mini since it's a PPC model- might still be on the Install disc) will convert Word docs to its own format when opening them, and can also save them as Word docs again, but it's not always reliable. OpenOffice.org probably is the best known alternative to MS Office, and I've found that it works better with Office documents than anything else I've tried (except Office of course). There are two versions of OpenOffice for the Mac. The first, OpenOffice.org for Mac OS X (X11) will require that you install the X Windows System. X11 can be downloaded here. OOo (X11) doesn't look and behave like a regular OS X application, however if you only have 256 MB of RAM it probably should be your first choice, for speed reasons. If you have 512 MB or more, and don't mind an application that is a bit slower, you can get NeoOffice. Unlike OOo/X11, this one has a nice Aqua interface and is better integrated to OS X.