Mac PowerBook G4

Hey guys,

About six months ago, I bought a 12" model of the powerbook and immediately fell in love with it. It was really small and very well built. The operating system was killer. I kept thinking that it was what Windows should have been.

Anyway, I had two problems with it. I'm an attorney and I exchange documents with other attorneys. I had never even thought about it before, but after getting the Mac, I realized how many attorneys are using WordPerfect. What made me realize it was the fact that I couldn't find a converter to convert these documents to my format of choice, which is Word. Even Mac Office doesn't include a converter.

Have any of you out there had this problem and found a solution?

My second problem was that my PDA of choice has always been a model based on PocketPC. I couldn't find anyway of reliably syncing my PPC with the PowerBook. Are there any solutions.

I'm asking because I wound up returning the PowerBook and got a Sony Vaio PCG-V505EX. All I can say is that the Sony is a piece of junk, compared to the Mac in terms of build quality. I've only had it for about six months and the keyboard is already giving me trouble and the battery is about shot.

Any help would be appreciated, especially since the newer models of the PowerBooks now have faster processors. Just more to love.

Thanks,

Tony, I've had (and am using right now) a Sony Vaio PCG-R505GL for the past two years. In the past month I've had some big-time powering-off problems, but have not had anything significant until recently. I would LOVE to have a Mac Powerbook after seeing them at our local Apple store. They are so sweet. I wish you had come to find some resolution on your compatibility issues before bailing on the Mac. Surely Apple has come up with some sort of converter for Word files.

Hey Tony, should have asked before you returned the 12", but you're right -- now you can get a faster processor and that scrolling track pad too! Love my 15".

WordPerfect -- several options here:
1 - Ask the other attorneys to send documents in RTF format.
this isn't always an option, which brings us to:
2 - Download OpenOffice (Free) which should be able to open WordPerfect documents and then re-save as RTF or Microsoft Word.
3 - Put VirtualPC on there. Not an ideal solution, but it would work -- you could open the documents in WordPerfect on VirtualPC and work on them there or, assuming you wouldn't loose any formatting, convert to RTF and then bring into Office:Mac. VirtualPC is bundled with Office:2004 Professional.


That's going to present a little more work than just opening it in WordPerfect on a native PC, but I think the tradeoff is worth it to get to have a PowerBook again /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif



As for the PocketPC, that one is simpler. There are 2 programs out there, PocketMac and Missing Sync for PocketPC. I used Missing Sync for PocketPC and it was good but a little slow. That was the first versoin, however. I don't use my PocketPC much anymore (The basic PDA functions of my cell phone make the best PDA I've ever had.) so I can't comment on how Missing Sync works now days, but I have heard that PocketMac now has the advantage.

Links:
VirtualPC (Bundled with Office:2004 Professional for Mac)
MissingSync
PocketMac
OpenOffice

Good suggestions Saaby.

Too bad you sold your PowerBook, i LOVE my 12". I have an orginal Rev A version, and i have been wanting a new one lately, seeing all the new specs and whatnot!! lol... anyway

Yea there is tones of software out there for Mac, it is just not as widestream as on Windows and you have to look around to find solutions, but there are many people with Mac's with the same software problems and they usually just write their own programs and solutions. Good places to check for software, of ALL different kinds are places like...
http://www.versiontracker.com
http://www.macupdate.com

Those two sites have all the software you could ask for. And if you can't find it there you probably won't find it!! lol

Goodluck

Hope you can get a new PB ASAP! /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

By the way, if you've got an American Express card, use it to buy the PowerBook.

My uncle had a Rev A. PowerBook and started having problems with it when it was maybe a year out of warranty.

Long story short: It was going to be $1,000 to repair. American Express extends all manufacturer warranties 1 year on electronics. He ended up shipping his laptop off to AmEx's salvage facility, and he was then refunded the original purchase price for his nearly 2 year old laptop.

Impressive eh?

I seem to have found the trove of 12" users here - I've got a Rev A 12", and I love that little bugger - it's just a workhorse, and a great combo of size and capability.

I don't have anything to add regarding your compatibility issues - my guess is that anyone still using WP is VERY used to getting requests to send in RTF or another universal format.

I'll second the Amex or other CC extended warranty - it's a huge win when things go wrong.

Hey guys,

Thanks for all of the info. It just so happens that I got the replacement warranty on my Sony, so all I have to do is take it into CompUSA and they'll give me another 'puter. I just have to make sure that the Mac will be able to do everything that I'll need it to do. My laptop working properly is CRITICAL to my making a living.

Although I had a 12" model for a short time, I really didn't have the opportunity to give it a good workout. How does the 12" perform, relative to the larger models? I do have my gripes about the Sony, but I do have to say that it is fast. I just don't want to be disapointed with the Mac.

Thanks,

... And if the doc comes to you in WordPerfect format you could try MacLinkPlus which is supposed to be pretty darned good at converting you-name-it, especially WP files. Strange that you needed a converter, though, because the new WP is supposed to be very compatible with Word, which does not require any conversion at all between Macs and PC's. (Well, some of the screenshots taken by the Mac OS come up reported as a non-standard TIFF on earlier Word products I believe but that's minor and you can work around it by using the GraphicConverter program included in MacOS X 10.3.x if you need to.) So anyway, RTF should work as mentioned by the others above but so should regular .doc format. And asking for a .doc doesn't draw the "huh?" that .rtf does.

Hey -- didn't Corel start as a Mac-only company? Was it even owned by Apple for a while? What happened there? Someone please straighten out my crappy memory on that stuff.

BTW, I used VirtualPC (now owned by Microsoft) Win XP SP2 on my 15" PB G4 for, among other things, documentation on a recent Oracle development project. It worked fine. I have 2 GB RAM in the laptop, but MS has limited the VirtualPC that it can only be set to use 512MB max for some undocumented reason. Worked fine, though. I did a bunch of screenshots of my work using HyperSnap and pasted them into the MS Word doc. That's pretty heavy processing for an emulator but it ran fine. The company I was contracting at required that I use Novell Netware and Lotus Notes. Those loaded up fine in VirtualPC too. And the wonderfully sorta funny thing to me was that Novell totally hosed 50% of the other team member's genuine Wintel laptops but loaded fine in my Mac's VirtualPC. Oh, and the company required that I let them load Macafee antivirus too, which also went onto VirtualPC. Ran fine, but previous to their loading antivirus software I had tried to load my own Norton's Antivirus 2005, which failed numerous times to load no matter what I did. Eventually I had to buy a real Dell for real speed with Oracle Developer tools and other stuff, but the emulator was working great for regular stuff. And dragging & dropping files between the Mac and PC desktop really works. To me that's the single most amazing thing of the interface.

[edit] PS: AMEX rocks. I just got a letter yesterday stating that they're crediting $1000 to my card for the damage my 6 yr old son did to my 23" Apple display on it's 2nd day at home. With a paperclip. Saying that the computers are taking me away from him, etc. It won't buy a new display but AMEX kept their end of the deal no question, no weaseling, all straight up.

I use OpenOffice on Linux and it works great, I use it on Word docs people send me all the time. I haven't tried it on WP but I'd expect it to work just as well. I feel no need to run MS Word since OpenOffice works every bit as well for my purposes, even if it's missing some fancy features (OLE?) that I don't care about.

Apple released their "pages" product recently as part of "iWork" along with Keynote 2.0 their answer to powerpoint. I've been using pages since the day it arrived in my mailbox after it was released and it's really very good. But checking the importer, word perfect is not on the list. Word Perfect gave up their Mac version SO long ago I've forgotten it even existed, though I did use it for years.

I also experimented with Open Office and it works pretty good too, you'll definitely want to experiment with that too for converting things.

If you have some non-sensative word perfect documents that are an example of the type of thing you have to open, feel free to email 1 or 2 to me. I'll try them in all the various word processors and converters I've accumulated around here and see if I can find something that will open them easily.

My email is in my profile /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

EDIT: oh, and if nothing else will open them, (which would surprise me) mac link plus as linked above will definitely be able to convert it to something else. I'd think that legal documents don't have very complex formatting or pictures to flow around or any such thing that might get lost in the translation.

As far as the 12" vs. the bigger versions, for what you do it should be fine.

I have the 15" because I do a lot of video editing and wanted the bigger screen, extra firewire port, the PC Card slot (Which I use for a Firewire card so I can capture from camera straight to external hard drive) and, perhaps most of all, the backlit keyboard /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif. If any of these things are things you can't live without, you might be better off with the 15". Sounds like you're looking more for portability than huge screen real-estate and the ability to quickly move loads of data (Talking about GBs and GBs here).

The only *bad* think about the 12" is it's screen resolution -- 1024x768. I don't think it's so bad because you get much smaller than that and it's hard to see things, but some people don't like it. This is easily fixed, when you're at your desk anyway, by adding an extra monitor. The 12" supports dual monitors, so you can have your iTunes open on the PowerBook and edit your word documents on a bigger LCD or CRT.

It's important to note one of the major differences between the more expensive powerbooks and the less expensive iBooks is the dual video support. The iBooks support only video mirroring, meaning you're looking at the same thing on both the built in monitor and the external one, but the powerbook support multiple screens. I use this all the time with a 17" flatscreen that I have sitting next to my powerbook on the desk. Really gives you a HUGE amount of screen realestate to use. And lets you do fun things like watching a DVD full screen on the external monitor while still working on the built in one /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif

The video out functions in the same way so you can do fun things in hotel rooms like play rolie polie olie DVD's on the TV in the room to amuse your children while still sitting at the desk, online working with the built in monitor! Don't laugh, I've done this! Just got to remember to always travel with your various video adaptor cables /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

The video cards in the iBooks support dual displays, Apple cripples it. There's a program that fixes that though /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif

I used to be such a hacker /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif now Ryan out does me with his knowledge of Mac Hacks! How is it that I've fallen so far?

A little googling and my wifes iBook is now dual monitor enabled /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif She's going to love that next time she has to give a presentation so she can have her keynote notes on her screen, and the presentation on the other...

I used my PB G4 for development recently at a large, well-known health care provider. I set up my PB below the external display so I could see more of an extremely tall config page of an Oracle HTML DB development window all at once. It's just so easy to config. Bunch of geeks who should have known about tech called others & crowded around the cube. Gave me a hard time. Not as though many contemporary PC's can't do it, but few folks know about or use the feature.

Then there's using VirtualPC full-screen, projected during a conference. I hit the OS X Exposé feature to zip back to a Mac window for something and heard a unanimous "Wait! Wow! What the heck was that!" /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/happy14.gif

All very rewarding while helping to get the job done, thanks to Apple.

I"ve been using dual displays mapped out that way on my Mac since what, like 89? 90? I don't know which the first Mac was that supported it but it wasn't too long after that. Basically works the same way still.

I have also enjoyed gasps as I did things with my powerbook in large companies like VNC into the NT server and even things as simple as logging into a window file share. If I had a nickel for everytime I heard "I didn't know a Mac could do that!" I'd be the owner of the company instead of an employee and would be making the IT purchasing decisions myself /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif