Let's try again...

OK, so I've had a little bit of time to piddle around with the new acquisition , and it is definitely an Indigo iBook, 366MHz processor, 320 Megs of RAM, and a 10 Gig hard drive. Single USB port, Firewire port, internal modem, and ethernet jacks. Also, it appears the battery and CMOS battery are doing fine. I left it plugged in overnight, and it reads 4 hours 40 minutes on the battery charge, though I don't know how accurate that time estimate might be yet, and the date and time held, so I'm guessing the CMOS battery is fine as well.

As there are no wireless networks nearby, nor do I have any sort of high-speed access, I plugged a phone line into the integral modem jack, and puzzled my way onto the internet. The default browser, to my astonishment, was Internet Explorer for Macintosh. I had no idea Microsoft marketed products designed for it's competitor. I ran into a couple of minor snags on my first foray out. It looks like the best resolution allowable on my screen is 800x600. I actually only have two options at this point, that, and 640xsomeodd. At the best resolution, my little explorer browser only displays about one half width of any web page. That'll get annoying, as I do enjoy reading online. I'm not sure if that's because of the browser, or some setting integral to the web pages themselves. I hope to puzzle that one out later on.

One thing I found very annoying, was the fact that the modem kept disconnecting when there was a lag. I dial-up over old copper-wire pairs to get on the net, and as pitiful as the connection might be, the modems I've used on my windows boxes have always hung on stubbornly, like a bulldog. Eventually, the flow of data would pick up again, and I'd be fine. The continuous redialing was very bothersome. I'll have to do some digging and see if that's a mac thing, and correctable, or maybe I have a modem problem.

I did a little bit of surfing, thanks for the point towards LowEndMac Tam, and learned that my particular iBook, runs well with OS 9.2.2. It came to me with 9.1, and no disks. I was thinking I might go ahead and upgrade it, but I find, much to my dismay, that the upgrades aren't on the apple site. I'd thought it would be fun to download and upgrade from the apple site on my new apple :) A little more searching, courtesy of LowEndMac once again, showed several places willing to sell discs for the upgrade, albeit at exorbitant prices. I'd thought that it would be a free downloadable upgrade, as it was still a version of OS 9, and not moving up to the newer OSX and it's variants. Apparently, I was mistaken.

I also thought it would be fun to make a blogger post from my new iBook, but there are apparently some kinks in the system. I'm not sure if it's the OS, the browser, or what, but the Blogger site is all barked up when I go to the 'create new post' section. I'll have to do some more research to see what's going on there.

All in all though, I'm quite pleased with my new purchase, and look forward to learning my way around the macintosh system. Perhaps I'll even be able to talk my better half into letting me purchase a new mac, when the time is right :)

Take care all,

Casey