At the beginning of the summer I went through a series of problems with my computers. My Powerbook Duo 280C had gone bonkers. Files showed up with screwy names and there were frequent bombs. I use this computer for our frequent travels to Maine in the summer. The most essential files are my Quicken and Excel files. It is also used for my e-mail. I took it to Maine anyhow thinking I could straighten out the problems when I got there. To make a long story short it was a disaster.
My next choice was to shop for a new computer. When you are in the back woods, this isn't easy. MacWarehouse is probably my best friend up there and the FedEx man knows me well from previous summers. We had bought a printer for the Mac from the Circuit City store in South Portland the summer before so we gave up a day of fishing and made the journey. To my distress they were selling nothing Mac this year. Oh well! I looked at their computers and decided to buy a Toshiba portable which had CD, disk drive, HD and 56k modem in one package. The reasoning behind this was my husband was struggling with the one his office provided for him, and I thought if I learned it, I could help him.
Now I am pretty good with computers (been in Macs since the Mac Plus days) and have a lot more patience with machines. But after a month of working with Excel and Quicken on Windows 95, constantly frustrated with the tedious problems of transferring my files from a Mac into Windows form, I did what all of you know I should have done from the beginning. I bought a Powerbook G3 through the mail order houses. (I have yet to find a Mac store where we are in Maine.) What a difference!
However, I did learn one thing from the expensive experience. On the Toshiba there was a demo game called Jixxa which is a program for making jigsaw puzzles but it is only made for the PC. Being an old addictee of jigsaw puzzles I decided to look on the Internet to see if anyone had created something for the Mac. This adventure took me to Centron Software, http://www.centronsoftware.com/frames/jigsaw/jigsaw.html, where I found their product called Jigsaw Power. Their phone number is 910-215-5708 and their e-mail is centron@ac.net.
The nicest thing about their product is you can change any puzzles into any number of choices from very easy to very hard. After you build all their 250 puzzles, you can import any PICT file and make new puzzles. Now whenever I answer the phone, I bring up a puzzle on my computer and have a marvelous time building my puzzle while the other person is chatting.
Jigsaw Power
Centron Software
$49.95 ($36.95 direct)
800-848-2424
http://www.centronsoftware.com/frames/jigsaw/jigsaw.html
Revised December 13, 1998 Lawrence I. Charters
Washington Apple Pi
URL: http://www.wap.org/journal/