Thanks to Suw Charman (and here and here), I found out what that magenta line down my PowerBook laptop monitor is most likely caused by — a short in the connection between the ribbon cable and the monitor. Seems to be a fairly common problem with PowerBooks–Apple, not being the most concerned about quality assurance it seems when it comes to delivering hardware.
Unlike Suw, though, and other folks, I have only had the one line — knock on wood. But I also have a broken case and a jammed battery, which is starting to fail, so I can’t take the computer off its power source.
I am thinking of returning to my Dell laptop for most of my work. The keypad is acting up, but I can attach a keyboard and everything else about the machine is perfectly fine. The only problem is I have Photoshop for Mac OS X but not Windows.
I’m thinking, though, that from what I can see of Gimp, as well as OpenOffice (and NeoOffice), that the better route for me to go is load Linux on the Windows machine and get it ready to be my backup environment. To that end, I ordered a couple of disks of Ubuntu Linux. I don’t know if it’s the better Linux or not–but I really like the organization’s attitude. And what’s not to like about an operating system that has a hoary hedgehog release?
(Thanks to Sam Ruby and Jonathon Delacour for recommending Ubunto Linux.)