My employers here at CMP Technology got tired of listening to me beg and threaten to hold my breath until my face turned blue, and they got me a PowerBook to replace my ThinkPad running Windows. When they delivered it, I was startled that it had a wee-small 12-inch display.

I had been expecting to get a notebook with a full-sized display. But I adapted quickly and now I think 12 inches is the ideal size for a laptop display. It's big enough to work on, and small and light enough to stuff in a briefcase and take it places where you'd rather not be hauling around a larger notebook.

I wouldn't want to use this display as my primary interface to the Mac. But, fortunately, you can have both the small display and the big one: Use the wee-small notebook display when mobile. Then get yourself the biggest display you can afford on the desktop and attach that display to the notebook.

Another benefit to the PowerBook as a mobile computer: The transformer is a cute little white thing about the size of my fist, not the enormous brick that's standard with Windows notebooks.

When I say it's a new PowerBook, I mean it's new to me. CMP got the notebook 15 months ago. It doesn't have one of the new Intel processors, rather the previous-generation PowerPC, specifically a 1.5-GHz PowerPC G4, with 1.25 Gbytes of memory.

However, I don't need a high-powered machine. I'm not doing high-end physics calculations on this thing, mainly just writing, surfing the Web, and doing e-mail, and the PowerBook is powerful enough for that.

The PowerBook is powerful enough to run Second Life reasonably well, and Second Life uses a lot of resources. Although running Second Life on a wee-small, 12-inch display is a trip -- it's not like being transported into another world so much as it's like being shrunk down into a dollhouse, like the Incredible Shrinking Man.

I've been bringing my favorite software over to the new Mac over the course of the week. Mac OS has a built-in utility, Migration Assistant, for moving data and settings from one Mac to another, but I don't have access to my old Mac this week.

So far, the only problem I'm encountering is with getting my Treo to sync with the Mac. I'll deal with that in a separate post.