I admit! I’m *fairly* addicted to gadgets! Each year, I allocate a portion of my bonus for my “gadget budget”. However, whenever I get a chance (and the funds) to buy something new, I’ll grab the chance to do so. But faced with the current state of economy here in the Philippines, I have to somehow restrain myself from splurging.

But a couple of weeks ago, I chanced upon a post at PhilMUG.Ph announcing that one of the local Mac dealers Ynzal has a new batch of pre-owned Macs for sale. I followed the link on the post and something caught my eye: a Tangerine iBook is for sale and the price is Php 10,700.00. Since I was at my office at that time, I immediately called Ynzal and inquired if the said unit was still available. The person who took my call told me that the unit is still available but there are some hairline cracks on its screen bezel but according to him, they do not affect the unit’s performance at all. I know that I have a potential bargain here so I told him to hold on to the unit and I’ll be inspecting it during lunchtime.

So I took an early lunch break and headed on over to Ynzal (which was in QC and I work in Makati). Upon reaching Ynzal, I immediately asked for the Tangerine iBook and I was flabbergasted when one of the staff told me that it was already sold! When they asked me if I was the person who called earlier, they confessed that they were holding the unit for me (and I heaved a sigh of relief). I had them boot the unit up and I explored its folders and some applications. The apps ran pretty fast and the hard drive has already been upgraded to 30 GB. I promptly paid for the unit (they shaved off Php 200 off the price because I complained about the hairline cracks) and went home contented that day. Before going home, I had one of our “gophers” fabricate a Ethernet cross-cable so that I can connect my Chiclet iBook to my “new” Tangerine iBook.

Upon reaching home, one of the first things I did was to interconnect the two iBooks through my newly fabricated cross-cable. I simply enabled Appletalk on both ‘Books and they promptly “talked” with each other. I was able to backup most of my files from the Chiclet iBook to the Tangerine iBook. Then I configured the Tangerine iBook so it can dial-up to the ‘net. Configuration was a real breeze and it’s gone online at no time at all!

Now, the Tangerine iBook stays at home and is being used mainly as my home computer (while my Chiclet iBook resumes its mobile computer functions for me). Although not blazingly fast, the Tangerine iBook is nimble enough to create MS Office documents and is robust enough to run Adobe Photoshop CS without hanging. It works pretty well with my son’s MacOS 9 games and connecting to the internet poses no problems at all. The thing I love about it the most? I can surf the web “au naturel” without fear of getting adware, trojans, viruses and other malware.

My only gripe about the unit? Well, its screen resolution can only go as high as 800 x 600 but I don’t need to do full-time graphics manipulation on this baby so that’s just a minor thing.

I intend to get a USB Dongle-type wi-fi adapter for this iBook so that I can do wireless networking at home. I also plan to have its batteries repacked so that in case of emergencies, I can still use this baby as a mobile computer.

Now, who says you can’t find good bargains nowadays???