Upgrading office machines to Mac Minis?

Hello all. I work for a small design office (5 total, 3 designers) that is way behind the times in terms of upgrading. My boss has been researching it for some time now as he continues to suck as much life out of his old Macs as possible. Anyhow, because we are small, we have a bit of a budget. I saw the Mac Mini intel upgrade news and am wondering if this is a reasonable option for our office. The cost per unit is significantly less than the full G5's or G4's we've been looking at. I'm wondering, however, if the minis can handle the programs we'll need to run (and usually simultaneously): Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, Quark, Word, Entourage (sp?), Dreamweaver, Stopwatch. This is a list of what I usually have open (except for InDesign, Dreamweaver and Entourage they'll be new additions to our program list) on my machine at one time, while also saving imagery and project files.
Any suggestions or advice is greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
Really old Mac OS 9.2.x Need to upgrade

As PPC7410 mentioned, there will be a considerable amount of software upgrading to do when Universal Binaries are out. However, it will be as much as 18 months before Adobe releases UB's of the CS suite. And from the tests that have been done by Macworld and others, the CS2 suite is not real speedy running under Rosetta. While it may be ok for the occasional user, designers using the apps for professional work will probably find them too slow while running under Rosetta.
Again, as PPC7410 mentioned, there are G4 Mini's available still. But they can only hold 1GB RAM. While having all the apps that you mentioned open at once may not be a problem, actually trying to use one of them such as Photoshop may prove to be problematic. Photoshop loves memory.
Running older Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign apps via Classic may not be good enough for pro work. I'm assuming you are using the OS 9 versions of the apps. I've had no trouble with Illustrator 8 or 9 via Classic but Photoshop gave me some issues. I can't remember what they were as it has been a while since I tried it. And I should reiterate that Classic is NOT available on the Intel Macs.
The Mini I have has 1GB RAM. I just opened the CS1 versions of Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign. I also opened the MS Office 2004 versions of Word and Entourage. Since I don't have Dreamweaver, I opened the CS1 version of GoLive. I don't have Qurk Xpress or Stopwatch. I also have Safari open as well as Activity Monitor. I can already tell I'm having memory issues just typing this post. And a quick look at Activity Monitor is showing my Page outs are increasing. So I would say that the Mini may not be the right machines for your group.
Eric S.
Mini 1.25, 512MB RAM, 80GB HD Mac OS X (10.4.5) G4 DA 533MHz DP w/Giga dual 1.8GHz upgrade, 1.5GB RAM, Radeon 9600 Pro 256MB

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