John, have you looked at the support at www.apple.com for your power Macs? The Mac I am typing on right now is a Power Mac I bought in 1997 (Motorola starmax, an Apple clone) and it is upgraded to system 8.6. Get Norton Utilities for your Mac, tune up the system, and you should have plenty of power to do lots of "stuff". The Apple website has tech help all the way back to older systems.
I use this Mac for Photoshop, Illustrator, Streamline, all my internet software and page making, music software of various kinds, various text software, Adaptec for burning CD's, archives of many graphics files, and still have lots of room and power to create artwork.

Alice