So I’ve gone through the ropes and partitioned the drive and realized that the copy of XP professional that I had was just an upgrade. After a few tries at installing it I gave up and accepted the fact that I wasn’t going to be able to put XP on it. But this morning I had a bright idea. We have an older copy of Windoze 98, so I hooked up a USB cd drive, plopped the cd in there, and tried to install XP again. It’s working! I wasn’t sure if there would be issues with the setup cd being able to read off of the external drive. I had a few problems with the installer copying files, some of the files wouldn’t copy and then it eventually froze. I did some research and decided to try and use the external cd-rom drive - worked like a charm. Everything is now installed and working perfectly; it’s kind of weird seeing XP with “MacBook” written underneath it.
We’ll be using the new laptop for networking issues, out of town administration of the network - mostly using mac software such as Remote Desktop 3, and even a remote desktop program for the PC. I’ll keep this updated with any problems I run into concerning the MacBook.

We just purchased a new Black MacBook, 2GH model with 512MB or Ram. It has a built in iSight camera and a fun program called photobooth. I was in the middle of installing XP on it when I realized that I didn’t have a full copy of XP, only the upgrade. So, that will have to wait. But so far, I’ve installed Firefox and Thunderbird. Next will be Remote Desktop - but I’m not sure if RDt 2 will work on it, since RDt 3 is universal. We will probably just go ahead and buy the 10 client version of RDt 3 and be done with it. I will be doing some performance tests on it later to see what the little guy will do.

The whole move to intel based chips is a risky one, but I think Apple is doing it at the right time. All these people who want to have both windows and Mac OS can now do so on one computer. Even though Apple has always been more of a hardware company than a software company, I think that over the past few years with the introduction of iLife software, they are really leading the movement of personal computing. No one has any excuses anymore. Just go ahead and get a mac and start realizing what you’ve been missing out on all these years.

My next challenge, I’m going to see if I can find a pc laptop and put Tiger on it. Really, it shouldn’t be much different from the MacBook, other than a few hardware differences. From what I’ve read, it performs just as well as a native machine (running Tiger). I hope that this intel move will get Apple in a position to pull more of the marketshare. Wouldn’t it be crazy if Apple was at 10%, 30%, or even 50%? Granted, it would take decades, but still…

Have you ever wondered about the Basis Weight of paper and what it means? In this post, I’ll try and clear up some of the mystery of paper, how it’s measured, and other properties.

Basis Weight

Basis Weight is the designation given to a sheet of paper in terms of the weight of 500 sheets (a ream) in the standard size for that grade. For instance, the basis size for offset is 25″ x 38″, bond is 17″ x 22″, and bristol is 22.5″ x 28.5″. Don’t worry, there are a few more sizes to make things difficult. So, if you have some 80# bond, that means that 500 sheets measuring 17″ x 22″ weighs 80 lbs. Easy? Sure. Confusing? It can be.

Here are the 7 most common basic sizes:

Book
25″ x 38″

Bond & Writing
17″ x 22″

Cover
20″ x 26″

Postcard, Vellum & Bristol
22.5″ x 28.5″

Printing Bristol
23″ x 35″

Index
25.5″ x 30.5″

Tag, Newsprint & Waxing
24″ x 36″

I’ll have more articles on paper weights, lengths, thickness, etc. in the future, so stay tuned!