Being the geek that I am, going back to school inevitably brings on visions of back-to-school gadgets.
One of the things I am looking at is the requirement that all Haas MBA students have a notebook computer.
I already have an iBook (1.33GHz 12″) which is my primary non-work machine.
The question I had last week was whether this was fast enough or should I get a Powerbook (12″ 1.5GHz).
I ended up having MacService install a 100GB 7200rpm harddrive in the iBook on Friday.
The result is that the iBook is definitely faster and more responsive.
There is also no real sense of more heat generated or shorter battery life. I did notice a little more noise but that is only in a quiet room.
Another thing I played with was ATIccelerator II, a cool utility to overclock the ATI graphics chip on your Mac.
I successfully overclocked the 9550 on the iBook to 324/276.75 or 54.84%/50.92% over the stock GPU/Memory speed. Practically, this is only a pacebo though, since I don’t have any graphics-intensive games on the iBook (cross my heart!).
Having done all this, I probably won’t be using my newly upgraded iBook very much for the first two subjects that we are doing at Haas. Well, other than for the Organizational Behaviour (OB) project. The Microeconomics professor said yesterday that we didn’t really need a notebook in her class.