(MONEY Magazine) – SOLUTIONS Make old peripherals work with your iMac

If you're one of the 3 million or so recent iMac converts, you've discovered that you can't plug your old peripherals into your spiffy new machine. Why? The iMac--as well as most new PCs--has USB and FireWire ports, fast interfaces designed for the demands placed on today's machines. Virtually every PC printer, scanner, external hard drive or other peripheral made before 1998 has an incompatible SCSI, serial or parallel plug. When you consider the cost of replacing old peripherals--$180 for a Zip drive, $300 for an external hard drive, $150 for a new printer--you realize that your $1,499 cutting-edge computer could turn out to be much more expensive than you thought. Well, before you open your wallet again, you should know that there are several low-cost ways to give new life to old peripherals.

Let's say you have a SCSI Zip drive or scanner. The USB XpressSCSI from Microtech (the purple device pictured on page 189) easily converts it to a USB peripheral your iMac will recognize. The XpressSCSI, which won Best of Show at Macworld last year, retails for $79. But by doing a price comparison at the shopping bot MySimon.com, I recently found it selling at www.provantage.com (800-336-1166) for $72--less than half of what you would pay for a brand-new USB-compatible Zip drive.

If you have a lot of peripherals for your iMac, you have another problem. Most new machines have two USB and two FireWire inputs. FireWire technology is so new, however, that compatible peripherals are relatively scarce, leaving you with only two easily usable ports. The solution: the seven-port Mac Hub from Entrega (the blue gadget shown on page 189), which allows you to connect up to seven USB devices to one USB input on your iMac. If you need to connect even more devices, you can use multiple hubs. Available for $53.95 at www.buy.com, the Mac Hub is a good value.

If you have a perfectly good PC printer or multifunction printer and fax, make it Mac-compatible with Infowave's PowerPrint, which works with some 1,600 PC printers (a full list is available at www.infowave.com/pcl). The program, which comes with a USB-to-parallel cable that lets you plug the printer into any USB port, sells for $51.95 at www.buy.com after a $30 manufacturer's rebate.

Finally, if you're longing to run old PC programs that aren't available for the Mac, I highly recommend Connectix Virtual PC, version 3.0 for Windows 98. At $160 (www.buy.com) it's not cheap, but if you can't let go of those old Windows apps, it's worth the investment.

E-mail your technology questions to tech_enthusiast@moneymail.com.