Another iBook

Yesterday the School District of Philadelphia issued Judith a spankin' new G4 iBook. It's a 12" model with the 1.33 GHz G4, 512 MB of RAM, and a 60 GB hard drive. I think it just has a CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive, not a SuperDrive. It does have Bluetooth, however.

I did the initial setup for her last night including creating her user account, associating the AirPort with my home WLAN, and running Software Update; it came with 10.4.3 and is now on 10.4.4. Although I had to go through the initial OS-X setup, it was obvious that the School District had imaged it. For example, it had a couple of Terminal.app shortcuts in the Dock, and MS Office 2004 was installed and registered. It also had Firefox installed but I upgraded it to 1.5, since the earlier version had some security issues resolved in the new release. McAfee Virex antivirus for Mac was installed, too. I'd generally regard that as being as useful as tits on a boar, but it'll protect her against Office macro viruses.

Along with the iBook they gave her an STM Sport Laptop Backpack, which seems pretty nice. I like the layout and pocket arrangement better than my REI Big Byte's, although my bag has better padded shoulder straps.

I think she'll enjoy using the iBook a lot more than my old Compaq, especially since that old box suffers from intermittent XP wireless schizophrenia.