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June 24th through 31st Archives

Monday, May 26th 2003 00:01 CDT

The Grand Finale of Bagweek--The Last Two Reviews and a Charity Auction

And you all thought that we were just going to let bagweek fade off into the sunset. We're back today with the last two installments of our reviews.

The first review is a look at three separate bags from WaterField Designs. Check out the review here. We reviewed their 17" Racer-X, Large Cargo, and the Small Cozmo. There's a choice for everyone.

The other review is of a modern version of the once-famous "wetsuit" style cases for PowerBooks. Marware has created a line of thin neoprene sleeves for each size PowerBook. We took a look at their latest offering for the 17" PowerBook here.

And now that we've taken a look at all the bags that these companies have sent us, we don't have much use for them--we can only use so many bags at a time. We'd like to do something useful for them and a reader suggested we auction them to readers and donate the proceeds to charity.

So we'd like our readers to suggest an appropriate charity. Send in all suggestions to info@pbzone.com. We're open to splitting the proceeds among several good causes. All of the bags are for sale at the list price, so it's not an auction, but first-come, first-served. We'll take care of the shipping costs. Each of the bags available is listed on this page. As they're sold, they'll be removed from the page. So it's easy for us, payment is via credit card through PayPal only.

Finally, we'd like to give a summary of all the bags we've reviewed over the past three weeks:

• Shaun Jackson Design's LapTrap
• Spire USA's Zoom
• Acme Made's 15" Slim
• Booq's FoleeMessenger 17
• WaterField Designs' Cozmo, Cargo, and Racer-X
• Marware's SportFolio Extreme

PowerBook Tech Rejoins Ranks of Advertisers

PowerBook Tech, fresh off a round of revamping their website with new products, has rejoined the ranks of PBZone advertisers. They offer parts for your PowerBook, repair services, and a library of take-apart diagrams for various models of PowerBooks.

Answers on 17" Burning Speed

Here's a few reader responses to the 17" burning speed discrepancy between actual performance and Apple's published specifications:

I think it has been well established from the beginning that the 17"ers burn CD-Rs at 16x. Why Apple still lists 8x is unclear. From the first PBs to ship, it has been noted on many forums that the drive can burn at 16x. This is not just Toast, but iTunes and system burns as well.

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The technical specs on apple's site are indeed wrong. Apple's Powerbook 17 uses a Matshita drive ( a division of panasonic) which has a maximum burn speed of 16x. So, indeed Toast was correct. I discovered this as well on my 17 and i'm truly delighted. Here's a link to the tech spec's at Matshita.

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The drive used by the 17" Powerbook is the Panasonic UJ-815. Which Panasonic quotes as having the following specs:

Features
2X Speed DVD-RAM Writing
1X Speed DVD-R Writing
1X Speed DVD-RW Writing
16X Speed CD-R Writing
8X Speed CD-RW Writing
24X Speed CD-ROM Reading
8X Speed DVD-ROM Reading
Buffer Under Run Protection
DVD Multi Read/Write Support

Apple have disabled the DVD-RAM ability for some reason. But as you can see the drive should be capable of 16X CD-R Burning. I would test it myself but my copy of toast is in the mail. So it looks like apple is misquoting the specs as less than they actually are, which is a bonus. (Apple also quotes the CD-RW speed as being 4x)