Living with a PowerBook, Part Deux

I’m pretty impressed with the PowerBook. I really like being able to use it as my primary personal machine whether at home or at work. When I bring it home, I plug it into a 17 inch Apple Studio LCD, an Apple keyboard, and a Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer (the one with the tilt wheel) and go to town. It does have a few quirks I’ll comment on, but they’re nothing I can’t live with or fix at some point.

First, the native video quality of the LCD, at least from a brightness and color saturation standpoint, in this PowerBook is not as good as it was in my iBook. It’s not so bad that it bothers me, but it is noticeable. I read in a forum that the new PowerBooks (the 12 inch 1.33 GHz in my case) have better screens than the older generation. If you’ve ever seen the difference in brightness and clarity between Apple 17 and 20 inch displays, then you know what I’m talking about. The screen on my PowerBook looks closer to the 17 inch display; the newer PowerBooks look closer to that of a 20 incher. If you haven’t seen the difference (and especially if you’re trying to decide between the two), beat feet down to an Apple Store or Apple retailer and take a look.

Secondly, I kept wondering whether it was hard disk performance or dual processors that made web surfing and general tasks so much faster on my Quicksilver PowerMac. I answered that question by booting the PowerBook from a Firewire 400 hard drive running at 7200 rpm. From what I could see, launching applications and viewing web pages became almost indistinguishable from performing the same chores on the Quicksilver. I could get the same performance out of my PowerBook by installing a 7200 rpm hard drive into my notebook. There aren’t too many 7200 rpm notebook hard drives out there, but Toshiba does make a 60GB model that would exactly meet my needs and desires. I could get it from Other World Computing for under $300, but I’m going to delay buying it until I get closer to the end of my year-long Apple warranty. I am considering buying a LaCie D2 Firewire hard drive and running from it when I am at home; but for the moment, I like the near total silence the internal hard drive yields, so I’m leaving the whole subject alone for now.

Lastly, I encountered one little quirk running the PowerBook as a desktop. The 12 inch PowerBook has a mini-DV port on its left side that can be used via adapters to hook up an external monitor. Since I’m using Apple monitors with ADC ports, I also have to use an Apple DVI to ADC adapter in conjunction with the mini DV adapter. The DVI to ADC adapter contains a USB connector that plugs into the PowerBook to carry the USB functions. My mouse is plugged into a port on my Apple keyboard; I plugged the keyboard into a USB port on the Apple Studio display thinking that it would be the same as plugging the keyboard directly into the side of the notebook. Not so. With the keyboard and mouse plugged into the display, the PowerBook would frequently not recognize either on boot up (via the DVI to ADC adapter’s USB connector). Unplugging the adapter’s USB connector and re-plugging it back into the PowerBook would sometimes solve the problem but not always. However, plugging the keyboard directly into the PowerBook always results in a successful boot up. That’s how I run now. I haven’t seen any information out there that details this problem or whether plugging the keyboard and mouse into a display is simply an unsupported configuration. I also haven’t tried booting into Jaguar; I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that Panther is the problem.