Re: Advice on a iBook ...
On 16 Oct, this message from Rogério Brito echoed through cyberspace:
> For instance, some time ago I asked what x86 (mobile)
> processor the iBook2's could be compared to and I received all
> answers from a Celeron 300 to a Pentium III 800. :-/ What is
> a realistic figure?
Dunno. At work I have a Dell Celeron600 Laptop. Works quite well, has
long battery life (longer than the TiBook; though I have no idea how
much SpeedStep impacts performance), but the plastic case is absolute
crap. You get what you pay for ;-). Re. CPU power, I have the vague
impression it is comparable to the TiBook/400.
> Let me say that I'm not interested in a powerhouse. I just
> want to have a simple desktop, with simple browsing of the web
> (perhaps using Mozilla, presently using Opera), reading
> e-mail, working with Emacs, writing my own programs, typing my
> things with LaTeX, working with some database etc. Quite
> simple things.
All this should run fine on most any modern laptop.
> My most advanced projects as a user are watching DivX movies,
> encoding MP3s with lame and playing files with xmms. I'd like
> to take the lowest (i.e., cheapest) processor that could make
> me watch the DivX movies without skipping.
OK, now these tasks do ask for processor power. Here you should keep in
mind that MMX-accelerated code is found in many a multimedia project,
but Altivec code is not. But if you _do_ have Altivec-enabled software,
it kicks ass compard to the i386 processors.
> Battery life is more of a concern than processing power for me
> and the ads from Apple lead me to think that this may be a
> point where the iBook2 shines (is that true in the real
> world?). What about the TiBook?
I use it at home regularly on battery to do mail reading and web
borwsing (basically an advanced X-terminal ;-) and get around 3:30 to
4:00 of battery life. Turning down backlight can make that go up by 30
min.
> And what is the status of playing DVDs with an iBook2 or a
> TiBook?
See my other reply and previous threads on this list about that.
> What about the region thing (i.e., the drives are
> unfortunately RPC2, right)?
Yes, but probably the Linux players don't care that much; though with
RPC2, it's enforcd by the drive hardware, right? Well let me tell you a
story: When I first tried to play DVDs on the video-out of the TiBook, I
didn't know how to set up the external out under MacOS, and searched on
the web. The first result I got was about a region-free firmware for the
DVD player in the TiBook. I hear the flashed drive works very well ;-)
Cheers
Michel
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