November 26, 2003
RoadWarrior Notes
Today was the first real day of being a "roadwarrior" with the powerbooks. What a joy! I was hammering away on it all the way from Norwich to London - about 1.5 hours, I guess - and the battery was still half full at the end. This thing claims it should last around 3.5 hours. Compare that to the Intel laptop I had which would kill a battery in one hour ...
Doing a presentation on the laptop was also a life-changing experience. Plugging the laptop into the projector, it automatically extended my desktop onto the new screen. A quick tweak of my PowerPoint settings, and the presentation was displayed on the projector perfectly. Compare that to the Intel laptop, where I'd have to right-click on the desktop, go to "Display Settings", select "Extend my desktop onto this screen", and then tweak PowerPoint. And on the Intel laptop, my projected display was always offset to the left by around 100 pixels, meaning most slides looked decidedly weird.
Before the presentation, I realised my battery might not last the scheduled length of the meeting. I closed the laptop, took the battery out, put the new one in, and opened the laptop back up - and it simply resumed from suspend in about a second like nothing had happened. Why don't all laptops do this? Compare that to the Intel laptop, where I'd have to force Windows or Linux to suspend to disk, and then wait a minute or so while things resume.
While in London, David and I took the opportunity to hit the Tottenham Court Road (TCR) computer shops in search of neoprene covers for the powerbooks (given how much the laptops cost, we're going to make sure they stay in good shape). We found them in a branch of Micro Anvika. They don't call TCR "geek heaven" for nothing.
To end a useful and productive day, I managed to use the computer almost all the way home as well by swapping batteries again. I managed to catch up on all my aggregated news sources in NetNewsWire, and many of the mailing lists that I've not had a chance to read in recent months. This is what mobile computing should be like.
Posted by savs at November 26, 2003 10:19 PM