Macromedia Studio MX

[brammers]

Hi all,

I'm mostly a photographer, for which I've got plenty of tools, but occasionally I like to branch out into a little graphic design. Recently I've been messing around with vector files, but for the amount of work I use them for Illustrator is way OTT.

I've come across a package offering Macromedia Studio MX for $50 - Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks and Freehand. Don't think I'd ever do much with flash or fireworks, dreamweaver I might use once in a while, but freehand is quite tempting for some of the stuff I'm doing atm once my illustrator trial runs out.

Is it worth going with this for the price and considering the fact that it's long since been absorbed into the Adobe collective - no upgrades ever. I run a Dualcore Intel laptop with 4gb RAM and Vista 32bit - no problems anticipated? This was released back in '04. And will freehand satisfy me for just knocking around with EPS files? Mostly I'm downloading stock EPS docs off istockphoto and the like, degrouping them and then adding or removing elements, resizing, re-colouring...

Hopefully one or two of you will have used these tools in the past. Any advice appreciated

[fuddam]

sounds a bit cheap, TBH - lol
freehand is fine for EPS IMHO.

[superscaper]

You could run potentially into compatibility problems with Vista. It's not officially supported as you say so there's possibly a risk of some of the apps not working on your system.