Silence of the iBook

One of the simpler pleasures in our household is an occasional evening snuggle in bed with a good DVD and our laptop. Perhaps it makes no sense, since in the other room is an obscenely large television. But you really can't beat a big bed for maximum snuggle comfort, and it's nice to simply close the laptop and be able to drift off without having to move our lazy butts. It's a fine way to end the day.

Since I've never had a laptop that could play DVDs (my G3 was an early Wall Street Powerbook that needed a special PC card for it), this decadence could only be enjoyed with Conny's laptop. When her G3 Powerbook went up to be with the great Steve Jobs in the sky, we replaced it with an ice iBook. It's smaller, lighter and cooler. All these things are good. But, alas, it's also a lot quieter.

I mean it's really quiet.

It's so quiet we can't watch some DVDs on it, because we can't hear anything.

Oddly, it's only with DVD playback. Games and such are plenty loud. We've made sure that the volume for the DVD player application and the computer are at maximum. It doesn't help. It really stinks. On borderline movies, we can turn on the subtitles and just suffer with it, but it's annoying. Short of hooking up external speakers, which would be a pain in the ass in bed, I'm stumped.
posted 10:49 PM | link |