Ordered the PowerBook

Journal singularity's Journal: Ordered the PowerBook 1

Journal by singularity on Friday October 03, 2003 @01:23PM

This Tuesday night I finally broke down and ordered a new 12" PowerBook.

I have been looking at them almost since they came out, and started getting more serious back in March, when they cut the prices. I could never justify the final cost, though - I simply do not travel that much. I try to travel about once a month, and I am pretty good about sticking to that. However, the PowerBook would still cost more than the entire rest of my travel budget for the year.

What finally did it, however, was trying to use the crappy computers they give us to use in the office. 400 MHz Celeron running Windows 98.

A friend of mine took a picture and put it up on his web site. He IMed me the link. I tried looking at it in K-Meleon. No luck (said it loaded the image, but the page was all white). Tried in Netscape 7.0 (they will not let us upgrade to 7.0.1 when the only addition was the pop-up blocker!). No go there. Tried in IE. Took down the entire computer.

You cannot imagine my level of frustration. I was sitting in the same building as my computer with month-long uptimes only interrupted by software upgrades, and I was having the most asinine problems with a computer.

The thing crashed if you looked at it incorrectly. Trying to get around DeepFreeze (which returns the computer to a standard configuration after each restart) was annoying. Of course they did not see fit to make Acrobat Reader a standard application for the DeepFreeze. I had to install it each time I needed to view a .pdf until the computer restarted again. They showed us how to use Netscape Calendar (an acceptable program, although I still prefer Palm Desktop) and removed that last semester. I was stuck using webmail because there was no decent mail client. They even prevented me from using Pine for several months! You cannot fully realize my level of frustration at this computer unless you have been using a Win98 machine for 20 hours a week for the last 2.5 years.

I decided I could justify the cost of the laptop by knowing that I could bring it into my office with me and work on it there.

I ordered a fairly packed 12" PowerBook. I went for the 60gig hard drive to save some money, and since my PowerMac has the DVD-R, I skipped on that, as well. I ordered a 512meg stick from TransIntl.com, and that is already on its way.

One problem I already foresee - Panther is coming out soon. Hopefully I will be entitled to a free upgrade when that ships. I think Apple says that if your computer shipped in the last 30 days you can get the upgrade for free.

Oh, and while ordering I considered for a moment ordering an iSight (for .edu customers it is $130). It would be a nice toy to have, but I could see no serious use for now. I can always get one to play around with later.

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