Yet another journal entry about my new PowerBook. I partitioned the hard drive into four partitions of 5, 5, 10, and 8 GB each. Partition 0 is for Mac OS 9 and applications, partition 1 will be for games (which I can easily delete so that I can use the partition to install another OS fresh), partition 2 is my personal data (growing every day), and partition 3 is for temporary items and scratch space.

A couple of nights ago I installed Mac OS 9.04 (which came with the PowerBook) and ran Software Update to update a bunch of stuff. Last night I installed Microsoft Office 98 and CodeWarrior Pro 5 and ran the updaters for both. With Virtual Memory on at the minimum level (taking up 641 MB of disk space, too bad Ram Doubler doesn't work with more than 240 MB of memory) I've already used up a good 1.5 GB. I should still have plenty of space after I install everything, even if I make the Virtual PC Hard Drive more than 1 GB.

I've been trying to figure out how I'm going to use the old PowerBook. I'm going to use it as server, that's for sure. It's just what OS I'm going to install in it. I found a binary of BIND for Darwin which should install (I'll try it later) just fine. That means I can run Mac OS X and have the four apps that I need running. But I forgot the scanner, which won't have a Mac OS X driver until the final release. I can't use my new PowerBook because it's a SCSI scanner. I guess I can do without for a few months (what do I ever scan anyway?).

I plugged in the Apple Pro Mouse into the PowerBook. It's works smoothly and the clicking and size are fine out of the box (not that I can change the size). It lights up with a red glow that turns brighter when the mouse is used (it dims after a couple of seconds of inactivity). So far I haven't had any problems with it, certainly seems good enough to play Unreal with. The cord is a bit short though (like most mice), so it's better to use it off of a keyboard.

It'll take me another few days to finish installing all the applications that I need. Then I can take it to work and see if it works without any significant problems. After that I can start working on the other PowerBook and set it up as a server. Hopefully I can set it up for basic things quickly. Then I should get some books and learn those apps, because they are quite complicated.

The new PowerBook is faster than the old one. Whether it's twice as fast (which is what I expected) or not is hard to tell. Certainly it's noticeably faster which is saying something. Then again there's nothing installed on it to slow it down. I haven't tried the DVD player yet. I'll have to remember to borrow some movies from Donald. Apparently you can connect an S-video capable output device and play the DVD movie on it. The manual says it won't as nice as using a standalone DVD player.

The new PowerBook also supports using the LCD screen and a monitor at the same time. Don't know if I'll do it since I'm used to only one screen. I suppose eventually I will do it as more screen real estate makes me more productive. It's also nice to run some full screen application on the secondary screen so that it doesn't mess up my desktop. We'll see if that works.

As a final thought, ICQ just came out with version 2.1a for the Mac OS. It adds firewall support, which means I don't need the Ricochet for ICQ. That would still leave email if I wanted to not use the Ricochet at work. Alas, the new ICQ crashed a lot, was slower, and had window updating problems so after a day I'm back to using 2.0b. Unfortunately I threw away the patch that streamlines the 2.0b interface, so I'm stuck with an interface that takes up too much space. (The download link at the ICQ X patch site is bad, hence I can't download it again).