Looking back at my blog, I find it hard to believe that I have yet to talk much about my Powerbook G4... I did quickly mention it as an inpulse buy... but I think it's time to talk about my favorite portable computer...
So, as a DEC-Dos kid, I grew up on the PC side of the world... Never really liking Mac's, even despising them -- their damn one button mouse, or the cutesy overpriced features they offered. As a kid, I was mainly concerned about one thing on my computer.. The latest and greatest PC Games, and as most you may know.. The Mac game department was severly lacking in quantity and quality of games available... As I outgrew computer gaming during my freshman year in college .. I started to make more use of my computer skillset and actually do some work with computers.. I was drawn into Unix/Linux around 1994, using MIT Haystacks computer systems and wrote a QBasic scientific calculator (Reverse Polish styled) which marked the start of my computer programming experience... As the web-exploded, I was pretty focused on staying on top of the curve.. learning as much about the next new technology..
So as a WPI college graduate, I had very strong background in DOS, Windows, Linux, Solaris, and Unix but was missing one piece of the OS landscape.. the Macintosh.. This is around the time of OS X (Mac's first unix based OS) being released... and thought i'd like to give it a try...
In a portable laptop, I did have some requirements.. Needed Microsoft Office. Check. Needed a web-browser. Check. Wi-fi and hardwired ethernet. Check, check. Needed to be able to burn cds, check. Play music, check. Play Games? eh, no more time for games, uncheck... Besides I had a PC desktop still. Remote Desktop Client & VNC Client, Photoshop, Development Environment, Apache webserver, MySQL.. Check, Check, Check, Check.
The bottom line is, the OS X laptop has been able to do everything I've ever needed.. There was a small period of time where there wasn't a VPN client for OS X to connect to work... then there was an OS X version released.... If I wanted to run a standard windows app on my laptop (windows version of Tax Software) I just remotely connected to a windows computer over the network. I wanted to use a Verizon PCMCIA card, and found out the setup for it online... I wanted to use bluetooth to sync my contacts, downloaded them from yahoo address book and importing them into my phone... Use my bluetooth phone as an internet connection, abet slow, but if I needed it.
Now with OS X's release of BootCamp for Intel based Macs, I expect all of you PC Only users to take the challenge, and if you actually still prefer Windows, at least you'll have a sleek and nicely desinged system -- Actually, I've seen so many new PC laptops that look strangley like, a Mac.. wonder why.
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After writing this, last night the hinge on my LCD screen broke. Apparently it happens often when they are dropped, although I didn't drop mine --
Would it have happened had I not praised my laptop the same-day? probably... still I need to either deal with it for a while, or get a replacement lcd monitor and/or hindge...
So my old powerbook is pretty much a nice looking paperweight at this point, I haven't looked into how much it would cost to fix, but I have a feeling more than it is worth to me.. I took the hard-disk out and backed up the contents though. I then caught wind of my brothers friend who had just got a new laptop because his old one was broken, turns out it was the 12" powerbook g4 800 mhz, with 256RAM.. So it was a bit of a downgrade, but not by much.. I am going to put in a 1GB ram stick, and a new battery and it should be slightly better than my old one... This one does have integraged Bluetooth and 802.11g which is nice!
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