Say Hello to my Little Friend!

There are several principles which guide my life; "form follows function", "conserve your resources", "find the greatest utility at the least expense", "reduce, reuse, recycle", and, of course, "never invade Russia unless you can be in Moscow before winter sets in".
In the spirit of these guiding light principles, allow me to introduce my little friend. She's a Mac PowerBook G4-867 meg PowerPC, 256 megs RAM (fully populated!) and a 40 gig Fujitsu hard drive. In other words, she's not too smart, not too fast, and doesn't have an impressive memory (at least for these days). BUT! She possesses charms that might escape the notice of those determined to always be on the cutting, if not bleeding, edge; and, she has been so good to me, my little Steely Mac, that I can no longer resist extolling her virtues.

First, let me reiterate for any who might not already know, I'm NOT a Mac aficianado; I cut my teeth on TI-99-4A's and Amigas, finally bowing to the inevitable with my first (home-rolled) PC and hot on it's heels a Toshiba T-1000SE laptop (no hard drive!), all the while getting versed a bit on IBM mainframes and AS/400s and that ilk. When my school job required me to get reacquainted with the Mac family, I hadn't touched one since OS7, and even that exposure had been rather minimal. Needless to say, the last several months have been verrrry interrresting! Fortunately for me, my experience has been so all-over-the-boards that, for the most part, it's been more like learning a proprietary software than getting broken-into yet another platform.

When I started with the school, I was assigned a big-guns-full-bore Macbook to be my main computer--2 gig processor, over a gig of RAM, 180 gig hard-drive, etc etc. Quite a tasty little laptop, and I've enjoyed using it. After a couple of weeks dragging it home and back every day (after all, I was trying get totally immersed in the Mac environment) I started getting a bit tired of the effort, and my thoughts turned to looking for some sort of solution. Then, I found my little friend. She had been purchased years ago to travel around with a projector on a cart and, when the district rolled out laptops to all the teachers, became redundant and a bit outdated, and got shelved. When I first powered her up, she hadn't been turned on for about 2 years.

At first, I just kinda liked her look, and maybe felt a bit sorry for her, stuck in a drawer for a couple of years. So I powered her up, recharged her battery and updated the software, just fiddling around with her for my own amusement. And then I started noticing some things; for one, she was full-featured: a couple of USB 2 ports, Firewire, ethernet, DVI, heck she even had a 56k modem! And an airport card, and a CD read/write, DVD read-only drive. Not too shabby for a little laptop. She was trim, too--a good two inches narrower than the Macbook, which, while shaving down screen size, also made her fit my lap very nicely. She's not really proportionately lighter than the Macbook (that titanium case, after all!) but I really sorta liked the "steely" look. Being basically abandoned, after all, I couldn't resist taking her home for a weekend of playing-around. And that's when I discovered her real attributes!

I have been a writer my whole life. I learned how to type when I was 16, and since then, I've written on a host of typewriters, and, eventually, computers. I'm pretty picky about that tactile interface. In fact, I use a remote keyboard with the Macbook because I just cannot stand the little plastic tab keys they feature. BUT! Steely Mac has nicely contoured, edge-to-edge placed keys and I quickly found that I could write faster, more accurately, and more comfortably on this little laptop than any computer since my pobrecito Toshiba T-1000SE, which machine had, for me, previously defined comfort! I spent quite a few happy hours messing with her, and ultimately realized that I might have found my Mac-toting solution. I decided to make her mine.

First, I thought about her capacities and limitations. She could serve as a pretty good netbook; kinda slow on accessing videos, true, but just generally surfing the web she ran fine. While she didn't have a lot of memory, that was ameliorated by stripping off all but the really useful and generally used software. I recovered about half of the hard-drive space that way, so you can tell I still have a lot of useful software installed. What drive space persists I dedicate mostly to temporary file space, so any files I want to maintain long-term get moved off onto flash-drives or my big-guns PC. The software retained is optimized for interfacing with that platform; too, I've been busy over the last year exploring net-apps, to reduce the apparency of which platform I might be using at any given time. Since I set up an 802.11G wi-fi for my roommate, Steely Mac's airport logs right on and I have zero connectivity issues-except for that not-too-big RAM.

Finally, this little goomer fits in my lap perfectly. I can type for hours without getting fatigued, the screen is plenty big enough and pretty enough for my needs, I suppose my biggest complaint is the crummy audio output. Still, put the 'phones on and it's good enough. It gets surprising battery life-I've run it over four hours on the batts with no real issues, although I tend to leave it plugged in, even in the lap, unless I'm not sitting in my chair, but then again, that's where I mostly use it. Virtually all of my blogging and blog-responding goes on with the ever-capable assistance of my Steely Mac.

While there are plenty of reasons to call it out-of-date, it's certainly not without value! I really like my little friend, and, especially since it is so pleasant to sit and write on it, cannot envision when it will become so obsolete that I cannot do without replacing it.

That being said, I've been noticing those tasty little netbooks lately.........