Not too long ago, most portable computers journeyed to hotel rooms and boardrooms, loaded up with spreadsheet, word processing, project planning, presentation, and email applications.

Now, modern-day adventurers stuff recording and movie studios into their PowerBook computers and tote them to the wilds of Antarctica, to the top of the Himalayas, to the Ruins of Budokan, to football fields, convention halls, courtrooms, and classrooms around the world.

Composer Russ Landau recently took his PowerBook to the Australian Outback. There to create music for the second installment of the runaway hit “Survivor,” he crept “into a cave in Undara” and recorded music on location “using my regular software, Logic and Pro Tools, with the highest possible quality—with maximum portability.”

“Then I went further into the Outback, built an on-location writing and recording studio, and mixed the final version of the theme,” he adds. “I created 10 new pieces for the new series. All this occurred within two small shoulder bags worth of gear.”

Some football teams rely on their defense; some, on an outstanding offense. At Pittsburg State University (which boasts a 108-18-2 winning record), coach Bill Kroenke proudly points to his special team: the Canon digital camcorders and PowerBook computers the staff uses to create Desktop Movies that help them continue their winning ways.

How do the team’s PowerBook computers score big time?

After each game, Kroenke grabs the DV cameras from their perches in the stadium—where they’ve been filming all the action—and hooks them up to the teams’ PowerBook computers. As soon as the footage has been downloaded, Kroenke puts Final Cut Pro in the game, using it to make “cut-ups”—short digital films players and coaches use to prepare for the next game.

“This system really is powerful,” he says. “A colleague from another school said ‘you’ll never be able to do video editing on the road ... no laptop can handle that.’ Then he saw the footage, and said ‘how do you get your tapes to look so good?’ I personally think PowerBook kicks the butt of anything IBM has on the market.”

“There’s something very inspiring about looking out the window at, say, the deserts of New Mexico while you add just the right hi-hat rhythm.”

So says Craig Anderton. A performing musician and creative director of MusicPlayer.com, Anderton may be creating a new drum loop even as you read this—as the plane he’s riding in passes several miles overhead.

Like any busy professional, Anderton spends a lot of time on the road and in the air. But that doesn’t stop him from being productive — even at 35,000 feet—because his PowerBook allows him to bring a recording studio with him wherever he goes. The PowerBook, he says, is “great for portable studio applications, because of the built-in audio and wide range of Mac-friendly music software.”

Dr. Manny Paraschos likes to look out and see a lot of empty seats in his journalism class at Emerson College.

No, he’s not suffering from teacher burn-out. Quite the contrary, Paraschos is more enthusiastic about teaching journalism than ever. He and his class have been energized by the prospect of reporting from a “newsroom without walls.”

Using their AirPort-equipped PowerBook computers and Canon GL-1 digital video camcorders, his students roam the Boston area looking for stories to tell, stories they film and edit in the field using Final Cut Pro.

“The technology has made it so easy,” says Dr. Paraschos. “During the summer we did as much as any TV station would do, with the same speed, and very good visual results.”

We have two pieces of good news for you today.

The first: we’re now taking orders for Mac OS X at the Apple Store and the Apple Store for Education. Order today, and you’ll be among the first to receive the OS of the future when it begins to ship on March 24.

The second: if you use your PowerBook (or desktop Mac) to record live audio, digitize archived audio files, edit new and pre-existing digital audio, or save edited audio files in a variety of formats, there’s a product you’ll want to hear about.

It’s called Sound Studio, and the developers, felt tip software, recently posted a version of the software that can be used with the Mac OS X Public Beta.

With Sound Studio 1.5.3 at your disposal, you’ll be able to bring all kinds of unique audio to life:

Did you know you own a powerful troubleshooting tool? That it lives in your System Folder and can be found by pulling down the Apple menu and choosing Control Panels?

It’s the Extensions Manager control panel, so named because it helps you to manage those system resources—extensions and control panels—that add functionality to your Mac but (in the wrong combination) can occasionally cause your system to act unusually.

By using Extensions Manager to turn packages of extensions on and off, you can isolate the culprit or culprits and get everything back to normal. Like to know more? We walk you through the process of using Extensions Manager in this article in our Technical Information Library: