h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Yeah, my mom got a MacBook, so she gave me her old Toshiba laptop. Some things are fairly ... new and unusual, compared to my old Dell machine, but it's got close to twice as much RAM (about 960 MB), the processor seems a bit quicker, and the graphics card is an upgrade too. Ah well, it remains to be seen how much better it actually is...

Traveller in Time curious
"Your mother got the new 'less then an inch thick' , 'fitting in a paper envelope' MacBook ?

All I have are desktop or even server cases main advantage is I can easily exchange parts "

Don't think so ... it's probably one of the not-quite-so-new ones. She's had it for a couple weeks ...

One of the things that make this "interesting" is that apart from the letters, numbers, F1-F12 buttons, and the spacebar, the keyboard has a completely different layout. The "Windows" button is on the upper-right corner, the ~ key is next to the space bar, Home/PgUp/PgDn/End are in a vertical column to the right of the backspace/|/Enter/Right-Shift keys, and Ins and Del are between the spacebar and the right Alt key. There is no right Ctrl key. I won't say it's counter-intuitive, because the only really "intuitive" interface is the nipple -- after that, it's all learned. Still, this will take some getting used to, although I'm starting to get the hang of it.

My only real gripe about this is that the lower 1/10 of the screen seems unusually bright when viewed at any angle other than "dead on", and even then it seems slightly lighter. I don't know if this is a problem, and if so how to solve it, but this, too, makes things "interesting" ...