How much worse is laptop battery life if you're playing DVDs? I'm thinking of buying a second battery for my iBook so I'll be able to watch movies while on the plane, waiting in the airport, etc.

On my PC laptops, DVD playing really does eat into the available power.

tommyrot, everything I've read indicates about an average of 3 hours of DVD-watching time out of an iBook running on battery power.

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger is supposedly coming out in April. [link] If the info is true, folks who are considering buying a Mac might want to wait until April. (The info is that 10.4 will be anounced on April 1 and in stores April 15.)

Oooh! I might actually have money in April. Good news!

I can confirm Teppy's "3 hour" figure.

When me and my sister were watching "Buffy" episodes in the car, we always managed to make it through exactly four episodes on a charge on my iBook. Though lately the battery has been misbehaving - I probably need to get it replaced before my warranty runs oun in October, at least.

Given this threads title, I think this may be of interest.

I wonder how close to the earth....

Hi, guys. I need help. I'm trying to set up my mom's TiVo for her, but the instructions aren't real clear about what to do when you want to connect it to a wireless router, and leave up connections to your dvd player and VCR. I know TiVo is supposed to replace videos, but we have some videos we don't feel like updating to dvd's yet, so we want to leave it in the connection. I'm just not terribly sure how to make that happen.

Right now the TV is connected to the cable box, which is connected to the VCR which is connected to the dvd player. It's easy enough to connect the cable box to the TiVo as well, without messing up the existing connection to the VCR, and then connecting the TiVo to the TV. Should I do that? And then what do you do about the wireless internet thing? Since my mom doesn't feel like dealing with looking at long phone cables across the house (which would be necessary if we used the phone hook up thing).

Could someone help me please? I'll be your best friend forever.

My setup is cable-->Tivo-->VCR-->TV. The DVD player goes into the TV's second set of input jacks.

When I installed the wireless adapter, it was perfectly happy to find and connect to our network on its own, but be aware that the first time you turn it on, it will want to make a phone call even if it knows it's connected to a network. (And there's no way to force it to use the network within Guided Setup -- you need it to be hooked up to a phone line.) After that, you can unplug the phone cord and never worry about it again. (Until you move and have to go through Guided Setup all over again because being one zip code over completely frells up Tivo's ability to get your cable channels, even though you're less than three miles from your old apartment with the exact same service.)

Cool. Thanks, Jessica!