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I'm In Love With My New, Wee Mac

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.

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