Good question on slowing Maverick down. With 16 BM of RAM, probably not. Many on Apple's forums say Maverick is faster than previous operating systems on the same machine. Once you upgrade, you will know which applications will not work. Place those vintage apps you need on the new Parallels virtual...

Like all Free FreeHand member, I love FH. I can make it do things that seem impossible for any other design application. I have tried all the workarounds to keep using FH (upgrading my 2000 Ethernet G4 to setting up a partition on my MBP to keep Snow Leopard and FH). Rebooting my Mac is really a pai...