[pdub99]

Hey, I've been lurking here for a little while, and I was hoping you might have some thoughts on which powerbook to look into.

I'm thinking of moving my current wintel desktop to be a domain controller / fileserver for a home network, and replacing it with a powerbook.

Things I am looking for:
Good performance (possibly a wee bit of gaming here and there)
Superdrive
wireless

The 12" is really too small (I am typing this on a tiny Compaq, and while I like the portability, I like real estate more), and I really don't like the thought of living life at 640 megs.
The 15" from what I have read has less than stellar wireless (but how much better are the AlBooks?), but has everything else I want; superdrive, 1 ghz, 1gb ). Can you just slap an PCMCIA wireless card and use it like that if the reception is too poor?
I currently have a 17" on order, but I wonder if it may be too large / heavy, less battery life, not to mention that it might take another month or two before it ever arrives.
I could always wait to see if a 15" AlBook arrives in a few months as well, with probably a corresponding price drop or speed bump.

Something tells me I should just wait for one more rev of the AlBooks to make sure that there are no glaring issues (or at least reviews of the 17"), but that involves more patience...

Decisions decisions.

Any thoughts?

[John123]

Originally posted by pdub99:
Hey, I've been lurking here for a little while, and I was hoping you might have some thoughts on which powerbook to look into.

I'm thinking of moving my current wintel desktop to be a domain controller / fileserver for a home network, and replacing it with a powerbook.

Things I am looking for:
Good performance (possibly a wee bit of gaming here and there)
Superdrive
wireless

The 12" is really too small (I am typing this on a tiny Compaq, and while I like the portability, I like real estate more), and I really don't like the thought of living life at 640 megs.
The 15" from what I have read has less than stellar wireless (but how much better are the AlBooks?), but has everything else I want; superdrive, 1 ghz, 1gb ). Can you just slap an PCMCIA wireless card and use it like that if the reception is too poor?
I currently have a 17" on order, but I wonder if it may be too large / heavy, less battery life, not to mention that it might take another month or two before it ever arrives.
I could always wait to see if a 15" AlBook arrives in a few months as well, with probably a corresponding price drop or speed bump.

Something tells me I should just wait for one more rev of the AlBooks to make sure that there are no glaring issues (or at least reviews of the 17"), but that involves more patience...

Decisions decisions.

Any thoughts?

Waiting for another rev would involve a LOT of patience!!!

If I were you, I'd get one of the current Ti's and get a third party base station. The Linksys is a great example. It won't be as user friendly, but for pure reception, it'll be an improvement. Remember, for anything wireless, there are TWO components that determine the strength of the signal...so increasing the strength of one can compensate for weakness in the other.

[pdub99]

I've got a D-Link wireless router and some extra cisco Aironet wireless cards. They seem to work fairly well for the most part, so I could always do that. I would be using the D-Link as the wireless base station at any rate.

Other than Firewire 800 and bluetooth, is there anything else that the 17" has that the 15" doesn't?(other than the obvious screen, backlight, etc.) I can't see firewire 800 being all that necessary, bluetooth might be useful moving forward though.