I use Photoshop 7, InDesign CS and Freehand 11 in my design work and need to upgrade on my dual G4, OS10.4.11. A new iMac to come later this year.

I can't upgrade to Creative Suite 4 because I have separate apps. I was going to talk to Adobe to see if they would offer a combo upgrade (with Illustrator). Some of the Creative Suite apps I would not use. It would still be cheaper to only buy the 3 apps separately that I use regularly.

I'm not a techie, live in a remote community and can't have my apps go down for any reason. My system has been very stable over the past year or two. I love that. I hesitate because...
I've heard that Creative Suite upgrades sometimes create problems in individual apps. How often is this?
Are 3 separate app upgrades cheaper and easier to manage?

It wouldn't be harder to manage at all. With the Creative Suite, Photoshop acts as the master program--you enter the serial, activate the suite, and that's all. One serial for the entire bundle.

You can get a discount on InDesign/Freehand that would allow you to get CS4 Design Standard for approx. $799 (depending on reseller). I think that would be MUCH cheaper than buying all 3 separately.

App upgrades are $199US each or $597 for all 3 that I use.

I read somewhere that when there are individual app updates that you download, it can create problems for other parts of the Creative Suite apps. Any experience with that?

That's sounds like a bunch of nonsense. They're separate applications and are updated accordingly--it should have no bearing on other apps. Could you be more specific?

I've used CS2 and CS3 Design Premium at work and own the CS3 Master Collection--no problems whatsoever with updates.

This came from Graphic Arts mag, March 2009...
HEADING - Beware of automatic software updates

Quotes:
- "Creatives Suites... shows up monthly to update a long list of items on your system"

- "... what can happen is you end up with files that you cannot open, or all of a suddent, you cannot export a PDF file anymore"

- "the worst thing after an update is that an existing project crashes or freezes in the new version... and is not fixed until the new update months later"

- "Other CS programs have had update glitches"

- "Both the Mac System and CS are interconnected and one problem solved can create another problem you didn't expect. Often it will be months for the next update to solve the issue"

What do you make of all that?

Honestly? It's still a little vague and doesn't really speak of much. The fact that there's no reader comments below the article speaks volumes to me. You should check out Adobe's communities.

From what I've heard over the past several years, the majority of people who had issues were those who tried to use CS2 with Leopard (general incompatibility with OS X) and those who pirated cracked software.

I wish I could offer something more, but the only issue I've encountered in the past couple of years with CS2/CS3 is the lack of multiple user account support with OS X. All my apps are updated and work fine with each other.

I hope that's encouraging enough.

Thanks MannyP Design.
Doesn't seem to a plethora of complaints here! :-)

The one factor that was the deciding factor for me was the upgrade from PhotoShop CS to a Suite means that you can never upgrade only PhotoShop again ... once you upgrade to a Suite from a standalone version, it's your only upgrade path and you have to buy the suite each time. The standalone version's serial # is marked as invalid for upgrades by Adobe.

So, I stuck with Photoshop as a standalone app, since it's what I need most and that keeps the upgrade pricing under $200 or so.

The bugs in automatic upgrades would not be a factor for me; I always set all apps to manually upgrade; one, because I prefer stability over new features, and two, because auto-this and background-that are always turned off on my Macs to avoid mysterious problems with audio processing.

The Intel machines are quite bad that way, buy the way. I got into some apparently bad habits with my QuickSilver where audio glitches no longer happened because of multitasking or processing multiple audio files simultaneously. It was a rude awakening to find the much faster and 6+ years newer duo Intel chips choking and giving me worthless output if I dared to try to do two or three things at once.

I had to go back to practices I had abandoned and had not used since I moved from Digital Audio 400 MHz G4's (the last PPC machines I had the same problems with).

Some audio sessions are one-time live events and there is no second chance.