Oh So Nice

Well my new PowerBook G4 is up and running and it’s amazing how much difference in speed there is compared to my old 400Mhz clunker. I’ve only got 256MB of RAM in the new one at the moment (the old had 384MB) which I’ll upgrade once my bank account recovers a bit, but things absolutely fly! I just tried our latest product which does some pretty intensive stuff with XML and is a bit on the slow side on both my development machine at work (700Mhz Celeron believe it or not) and my old powerbook. It flys on this little baby though! The keyboard on the new laptop is better than the old one too, much to my surprise. I loved the only powerbook keyboards, but these new ones feel even better. More “oomph” to the keys. The speakers have improved out of sight as well. I can actually listen to music through the builtin speakers and quite enjoy it instead of cringing at the tinny sound. It’s obviously still not as good as a really nice stereo system but very nice all the same. Mostly though, I’m appreciating all the extra hard drive space. Going from a 10GB hard drive to a 60GB drive really makes a difference. I’m currently in the process of moving my data back off of the external firewire drive and onto the internal drive. The firewire drive wasn’t bad but it’s so nice to not have to plug an extra device in to use your laptop all the time. It also tends to drain the battery. Speaking of battery, it’s nice to have a shiny new battery as well. The one in my old laptop was really starting to get worn out. The other thing I’ve immediately appreciated is having a CD burner in my laptop. I listen to all my music using iTunes on my laptop and all the music is carefully rated and sorted, being able to easily make a CD to listen to in the car using all those ratings is wonderful. I was really starting to get sick of the CDs I had in the car. All that goodness and I haven’t even started playing with GarageBand yet – I’ve been looking forward to getting my hands on it for quite a while.