What can I extract from PS7, and should I?

Question

I have an older mac which runs PS7, It's old and slow like me but I've read that its possible to extract stuff from the guts of the programme and save it to PE8 which I'm using on a newer faster upgraded macbook, which can't run PS7. What can I use, I'm immediately thinking of Actions, and should I do anything of the sort. Pointers to books or advice gladly accepted.

Answer 1

I was using PS7 on an old iMac when I started building my brush set, and I learned to make custom shapes.
Since then I've learned to make gradients, and have built a collection of 1200 brushes, shapes and gradients combined. I also have a font library of nearly 5,000, and all of this stuff is on a DVD-R that I've used to move my "personal set" from the iMac to a G5 iMac (CS2 & CS3), three PCs (CS2, CS3 & CS4), a MacMini (CS3, then back to CS2), and most recently my new MacBook (CS4).
I don't know about "deterioration" of these items as much as something in the files themselves that is simply no longer compatible as PS or PSE goes from one build to another.
It's not even apparent until I go to use a brush (or set) and get an error message. I have to delete it then. It doesn't happen so often with shapes or gradients, but I've seen a shape or two that simply won't work with CS4 where it did with CS3. I have three PCs running XP and CS3 and they all work fine. On Vista or OS 10.6 and CS4 they don't. Same applies to PSE6 and PSE8. Some styles, actions and shapes that work in PSE6 don't in PSE8.
I've not been able to find any rhyme or reason as to what causes it. I think it's just changes in the code when applications are upgraded.
I have found dozens of sites where people have created their own actions and put them up for others to download though.
My advice would be to pull what you feel you will need from PS7 and put it on a CD-R or DVD-r, or flash drive and once you have CS4 running on the Mac, copy it all into the right folders. Then, using PSE will show you which itms are compatible or not. They don't "break" the application, but you will get an error that "The (acton/brush/shape/etc.) couldn't be loaded due to a Program Error". When you see that, you'll know the particular item is not compatible. PSE will still run, it just won't use that item.