Macbook Pro nearly setup the way I like it

A quick update on configuring the MacBook Pro, MAMP is installed and working perfectly along with the Mac versions of Firefox and Opera. I decided not to install Camino or IE5. I've also now successfully installed Windows XP in Parallels and have installed WAMP along with IE7 and the windows versions of Firefox and Opera.

I decided to overwrite IE6 with IE7 rather than try to run the two versions separately. My opinion of IE6 has never changed, I hate it, it doesn't render pages correctly, and frankly I'm not interested in supporting it anymore. My belief is that IE7 will quickly become the standard.

My next task is to create a linux VM so that I can test the various KDE or Gnome browsers as well. Not sure which version of linux to install, I think I'd probably prefer to stick with Suse or Mandriva, but I don't have iso's for these. After visiting the local newsagent, I bought a magazine with Fedora Core 6 on the coverdisk. The installation went smoothly but for some reason KDE is defaulting to a very large screen resolution making it unusable. I'm trying the installation again but if that doesn't work then I'll have to default to Gnome and that would be a shame because I really want to test Konquerer. I wonder if that will work under Gnome? Hmmm, still didn't work, now its off to the drawing board to see if I can get the iso for Mandriva, Mepis or something.

As for the rest, I downloaded TextWrangler to edit my templates, it looks good but I can't seem to get any of the text editors I've installed to open the smarty tpl files. It seems the stickies program installed in OS X uses the .tpl suffix and I don't know how useful stickies is going to be so I'm reluctant to send it to the trashcan, meaning of course that I'm struggling to open all my .tpl files without manually opening them using the menu option to "open with another program". Any advice from other OS X users?

I was getting frustrated working out how to manage open windows on screen, with XP, all I had to do was click the tag in the taskbar to switch window, or I could press the desktop icon to clear the screen and get directly to my desktop icons to open new applications. Mac OS X doesn't work like that, and I had to go into Borders bookshop and hunt through a bunch of OS X books to find the solution. Expose!, wow, what a joy to use. I've configured three corners of my screen, one for dashboard, one for the desktop, and the most useful of all, one to see all applications. Now I understand why friends who have Mac's have been telling me to convert. The way Expose! handles multiple windows is awesome, automatically resizing every window so that they are all visible, and then simply click the window to bring to the front. This totally rocks my workflow.

Also, I'm looking for a replacement or update to Finder, xFolders looks promising so I've downloaded that and will test it later.

Only thing left to figure out is how to make the battery last longer. And I really need some advice on that one. I've set the energy saving config to maximise battery, dropped the brightness of the monitor and keyboard illumination, I'm not running CD's, but now I'm stuck, what else can I do to conserve battery? Are there any extra settings?