On 16 Oct, this message from Rog�rio 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 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Michel Lanners | " Read Philosophy. Study Art. 23, Rue Paul Henkes | Ask Questions. Make Mistakes. L-1710 Luxembourg | email [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.cpu.lu/~mlan | Learn Always. "
