[CyberGeorge]

Do you have a special preference in the System Preferences for your keyboard or screen? To adjust sensitivity or brightness, etc?

[tooki]

Yes. In the Keyboard prefs pane you can turn the backlighting on/off and adjust the brightness (in other words, nothing that you can't do from the keyboard), and the Displays prefs pane gains a checkbox to automagically adjust display brightness.

Alas, sensitivity control is nowhere to be found, nor any other options beyond the keyboard controls and their on-screen equivalents.

(I often run into the problem that the backlighting likes to light up at exactly the right brightness to make the lettering disappear altogether: manually making it brighter makes them more legible, but often, turning it off altogether is the best.)

tooki

[CyberGeorge]

Great response! Thanks a lot! Now, do you think these components are installed during installation of the System software on the particular machine, or are they there regardless of what machine you install Panther on and they just show up, if indeed you are running Panther on a lighted keyboard PowerBook? For example, I have a 3-button mouse now that I did not have before. In Expose I now have the option of assigning values to these buttons, which I did not have before. Would something similar be true for the lighted keyboard prefs? The reason I am asking is because I currently own a Ti and I'm buying a 15", so I want to know if it's ok to just restore on the 15" a backed up image of my hard drive, or would I have to reinstall everything?

Again, thanks for your help, and sorry for the double post, but I did not receive an answer in my previous post.

[tooki]

Well you didn't receive an answer to that question cuz you hadn't asked it yet!

My assumption is that yes, it would work OK.

But there's a better way to find out: test it before copying!

1. Put the TiBook into Target Disk Mode by booting with the T key held down.

2. Use a FireWire cable to connect both PowerBooks.

3. Boot the AlBook while holding down the Option key. This brings up the "Startup Manager" which, after a couple of seconds, will show all available boot drives. The TiBook's hard drive should show up. (If it doesn't show up, you know it definitely won't work.) Click on that drive and press the Continue arrow.

4. The AlBook will now boot from the TiBook's hard drive. This way, you can check to see if everything works.

That said, my personal recommendation would be to not transfer over the old system. Generally speaking, in OS X, if you need for one version of a system software install to run many models of Macs, you take the install from the newest machine and use it on the older ones, not the other way around. Chances are it wouldn't make any difference. But it is possible that the software for some features may not be present. You could meet in the middle and copy over the old system (to preserve apps, user files, etc) and then do an archive-and-install to put a fresh install of Panther over top of it.

Note also that you can use the Target Disk Mode to do the transfer MUCH more easily than using a disk image -- just put the TiBook in Target Disk Mode, boot the AlBook from the Panther DVD, and use Panther's Disk Utility to "restore" from the TiBook to the AlBook.

tooki

[CyberGeorge]

Yes, I had asked in a different post. Here:
http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.p...hreadid=203120

Tooki, thanks a lot for the responses. Good ideas. However, I won't have the Ti when I get the Al, but that's ok, cause I'll boot from an external drive where I will have my Ti's drive image.

What's on my Ti now is a clean install of Panther and then all software I need + mail databases carried over, keychains, personal prefs, etc. This was done 2 days ago, after a weird crash. This is why I wanna avoid doing it again. So, under the light of all this, I don't think an archive and install is going to buy me anything. However, if I see any panels missing when I boot from the external drive, I'll go the archive and install way, instead of reinstalling everything. It can't hurt.

As for the last note, that's a good tip. However, as I said, I wont' have them both at the same time, and either way I'll create an image for a backup. I usually do this when I switch machines and keep it for 6 months, just in case.

Thanks for all the replies and your time,
George.