Fun With BigAl
by Charles W. Moore
This is great fun. I'm thoroughly enjoying my new (refurbished) 17" PowerBook, and so far the speed is what I'm enjoying most. While 1.33 GHz is a relatively ho-hum in the contemporary context, it's a big jump from the 700 MHz G3 iBook and 550 MHz G4 Pismo PowerBook I had been using for production, and at the gut level it represents the most dramatic increase in performance I've experienced in a computer system upgrade since I migrated from a 100 MHz 603e PowerBook 5300 to a 233 MHz G3 Series WallStreet PowerBook seven years ago. Things like to Finder response, screen redraws, document/application opening, speech recognition response, and the Classic Mode start-up are what I've noticed most. A lot of things that suffered hesitation or lag on the older 'Books happen RIGHT NOW with the BigAl.
Of course, having 1.5 gigabytes of RAM doesn't hurt either. My poor little iBook, maxed to its 640 MB capacity, most of the time felt like it was gasping for memory. So far, the BigAl is breathing easy with everything I've thrown at it.
Surprisingly, perhaps, I haven't found the big 1440-by-900 display has facilitated much of a change in my work habits yet, except for the ease of keeping to documents open side-by-side, which is convenient, and one can move floating palettes out of the way with ease. The big screen is nice to have, but it feels more like luxury than necessity, and I never really minded working on a 1024 x 768 display. However, once I get used to it, I'll probably become addicted to the wide screen.
The keyboard is very nice, and its illumination feature is very cool, but I'm not sure I like the key action any better than with the keyboard in the Pismo, and it's not up to the standard set by the lovely keyboard in the old WallStreet. It is, however, definitely superior to the iBook keyboard.
To BigAl's trackpad is okay. I like the action of the trackpad button, but the pad itself is a bit balky and nervous at times. Again, the high water mark in this category is set by the WallStreet's trackpad, although the trackpad button on that machine is horribly stiff to operate (I activate the tappable features for most clicking and dragging).
Most of the time I use an external keyboard and mouse anyway, so the built-in input devices are not a day-to-day priority practical issue for me.
This machine, purchased from the good folks at TechRestore in a Concord, California, is an Apple Certified Refurbished unit, and appears to have had very little previous use. It looks brand new, with not a scratch or mark on it. I haven't noticed any dead pixels on the screen (and indeed in the 11 Apple laptops my immediate family has owned over the past decade, we've never had one arrive with a dead pixel), which is sharp and bright, but not as bright as the display in the new MacBook Pro.
The 80 gigabyte, 4200 RPM hard drive is nice and quiet, perhaps not quite as nearly-silent as the 20 gigabyte drive in the iBook, but certainly not annoyingly noisy like the 40 gigabyte, 5400 RPM, Toshiba unit in my Pismo.
The little 20 gigabyte drive in the iBook hasn't been adequate for about the past two years, but I'm nowhere close to filling up the 40 gigabyte drive in the Pismo, and I figure the 80 GB drive in the AlBook has plenty of capacity headroom for the foreseeable future. It would be nice to have the speed of a 5400 or 7200 RPM drive, but that might come with an increase in noise level as it did when I updated the Pismo's drive.
Speaking of noise levels, the 1.33 GHz AlBook definitely runs hotter than my two older machines, and the cooling fan is inclined to cut in frequently, which spoils the silence more cacophonously than a fast hard drive would. I've found that using either a RoadTools CoolPad (passive) or a Targus ChillMat (active fan assisted but with a very quiet fan) cuts down the internal fan's activity substantially.
Aside from that the 1 gigabyte RAM upgrade I ordered with the PowerBook turned out to be defective (the replacement one that TechRestore shipped out promptly works fine), the only thing I've found to complain about is that the screen latch is a bit stubborn about releasing. The laptop of this width should really have two latches set apart rather than a single central one. If I were opening and closing the lid a lot, the latch's crankiness would be a pain.
On the other hand, I like the dedicated removable panel beside the battery bay in the bottom of the PowerBook for access to the RAM slots. Adding RAM is quick and easy, provided you have a small Phillips screwdriver handy.
Now that I've made my system upgrade move after months of deliberating, so far I'm satisfied that I made the right decision. The MacBook Pro is a nice piece of work, but early adopters seem to be encountering a variety of bothersome issues, and my 1.33 GHz G4 is probably as fast or faster running the Power PC native applications I will be using for production for some time yet then the Intel machine would be running them in Rosetta emulation. For example, I just got my copy of Photoshop Elements 4, which is PPC native rather than universal binary, and optimized for the G4's Altivec velocity engine.
Buying refurbished made economic sense for me too. I might have been able to rationalize the purchase price of 1.83 GHz MacBook Pro, but not a new 17" PowerBook or the expected 17" MacBook Pro. While a new 1.33 GHz or 1.42 GHz iBook would have provided not a whole lot less performance (although the iBooks have only a 133 MHz or 142 MHz system bus vs. the PowerBook's 167 MHz, and a less-powerful video card with just half as VRAM) for less money, nothing else is a PowerBook, and this big refurbished machine will see me out of the Power PC era in style while Apple works the bugs out of the MacIntels. So far it's been a great trip.
Incidentally, TechRestore is offering a $25 discount to The PowerBook Mystique readers off any PowerBook or iBook in stock. Just enter the code CWM during checkout when ordering online. The coupon code is valid from now through 12/31/2007.
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