Live Trace on an Intel iMac - Useless!

I was working up a resume and wanted to include a photo as a black and white graphic. I pulled it into Photoshop and played around with various filters and effects but couldn’t quite get the look I was after. So, I opened Illustrator CS2 and tried to use Live Trace to give me something I could try to recolor; but as soon as I told “Live Trace” to “Make”, Illustrator gave me an “out of memory” error message!

My Intel powered iMac is already running 1.5 GB of RAM, so I couldn’t expand it but 512KB more even if I wanted to. I’m not sure why iMacs and MacBooks are limited to 2 GB of RAM; hopefully, there’s a technical reason and it was not done at the request of the marketing department. That said, rather than spend money on the machine or spend all night tweaking Illustrator’s memory settings to get it to run under Rosetta, I moved the file over to my dual 2.0 GHz G5 PowerMac. I did the work there with ease.

I’m really quite happy I decided to keep a G5 around. I’m getting tired of waiting for Adobe to get their Intel versions on the streets. The only thing making the wait tolerable is the knowledge I can transfer my work to my G5 and do it in a timely way. If I couldn’t, I’m sure I’d be looking at other ways to accomplish the work I need to do on my Intel iMac without using Adobe.