Ad Terras Per Aspera

New HD: Well, I finally got around to replacing the hard drive the Powerbook came with… what once was a 60GB Hitachi is now a 120GB Samsung Spinpoint M. Samsung Spinpoints are the quietest, lowest power using, and coolest drives on the market in the 2.5″ market, and they perform similarly to other drives of the same class.

Enclosure: My old drive is now in an Icydock MB663UB 2.5″ enclosure, and through Newegg right now its $8.99 total until December 31st. The enclosure is basically a box of high grade aluminum, with no wiggle room inside (touches drive on all four sides), and is only a tiny bit longer than the drive itself. Although it has a built in 2 inch USB cable, it also comes with a two-headed several foot cable for non-mobile applications (or for drives that won’t spinup in under 500mA). Its the best HD enclosure I’ve ever owned, in my opinion.

Memory: I’ve upgraded the Powerbook’s memory from 1GB to 2GB, and I have to say, Leopard runs a lot smoother… not that it is noticeably slower than Tiger, but its like a new machine with more memory. Between the new HD and the more memory, booting takes about half the time (not that I often do that, sleep is damned useful). 2GB is the maximum on these Powerbooks, otherwise I would have gone for more.

VNC: Leopard 10.5.1 has “fixed” the VNC bug to an extent… connecting with x2vnc no longer makes AppleVNCServer crash, but it just makes it chew all available CPU time and barely work. This does not happen using an normal VNC user (less than 10% CPU time on average), but I expect x2vnc is doing something weird that it should be.

Smallest USB hub: Powerbooks only have 2 USB ports, and I have at least three devices I want to plug into it… so I bought a hub just for the Powerbook: a hub that happens to be smaller than 2 by 2 by 0.5 inches, Targus ACH63US Super Mini Hub. I mean, this thing is damned tiny… its so small, that you could throw it into your spaghetti nest behind your computer and not even know you have a hub. It may be a tad expensive, but I didn’t want yet another box hiding on my desk somewhere… instead, I have it tucked behind my printer (which already has too much stuff behind it). The hub also comes with a two headed cable like the Icydock did, but the heads are far enough apart that they can reach both USB plugs on my Powerbook (one is on one side, one is on the other, instead of both being on the same side… Powerbooks don’t have rear ports).

Oh ho ho! The hub arrived half dead (which soon became totally dead), and Targus is giving me shit over having the hub replaced under warranty.