Now that I've been using my new PowerBook fulltime for a few days, how is it different than my old PowerBook? For one I think I'm getting some sort of RSI from using the new Apple Pro Mouse and Macally keyboard. That could just be me using the computer too much. It is quite a bit faster, although in most cases I stopped noticing after a day or two. Virtual PC is once again almost usably slow.

It took me a bit to figure out how to get the PowerBook to work with just an external monitor. Usually it'll want to do display mirroring or dual monitor usage. If you close the PowerBook though, the main display shifts to the other monitor. This points out to another slight problem. I didn't notice this PowerBook had a fan until it turned on after some heavy game playing. With the lid closed it gets a bit hotter so the fan is more likely to turn on.

Occassionally the Apple Pro Mouse stops working. I've only seen it happen a couple of times in 4-5 days and disconnecting it and reconnecting it fixes the problem. Probably some sort of issue with the keyboard, which is also a USB hub (it has two USB ports in addition to the cable leading to the PowerBook).

I've had some problems with crashes. The first time I got it down to some old extensions that some application installed. Another one is that sometimes one of the Applescripts that automatically runs when I startup crashes the computer. I've seen that before but I haven't been able to figure out why it happens.

SoundApp skips again when playing MP3 files. I remember it doing it also when I first got the 18 GB drive and installed it. Disk access tends to make it skip. The problem mysteriously went away after a week or two, so I'm hoping it's some sort of drive calibration and it'll go away here too. I tried to alleviate the problem by telling SoundApp to load the whole MP3 file into memory before playing, but that caused the PowerBook to crash when loading the second song.

That took me a while to figure out. I thought SoundApp wasn't compatible with Netscape or Internet Explorer so I went and looked for an alternative. SoundJam is free as a player (and a commercial program) but it had problems playing stereo sounds. Player Pro is really more of a sound editor and accordingly priced. I looked at Audion and MVP and a couple of other MP3 players. But other than pretty interfaces, they don't really stack up to SoundApp. One also didn't play stereo sounds well. Mostly the problem is that you can't set the default volume (so it starts out loud with the headphones plugged in), they don't autoplay the songs as soon as you open the playlist, you can't open multiple playlists to queue them up. But they didn't seem to skip. So in the end I figured out that I needed to turn off the SoundApp preload song option and I'll live with the skipping for now.

Other things. For some reason if the PowerBook crashes hard (totally freezes even the mouse) then it also resets the PRAM or something like that. When it next starts up it's 1904 and some of the settings are reset. Kind of annoying and it plays havoc with Palm Desktop. On the plus side the PowerBook is lighter than the previous version and the DVD plays fine (although I only tried for a minute or two, skipping around the DVD).

The next PowerBook (with a G4) won't be announced until at least January's MacWorld Expo. Apple has been having trouble getting it finished with some design problems that prevented it from being announced at Seybold or the last MacWorld. Meanwhile I'm happy with my machine and having enough memory for a 100 MB RAM Disk is nice. I can't seem to turn off save RAM Disk on shutdown though, which means there's this 100 MB file in the Preferences folder that I don't want to back up. So I have a script that deletes the file on startup and also clears out the RAM Disk -- that's the script that has occassional problems.