Finder icons and screen real-estate

I got this here 14" iBook in May, and overall I think it's great. One of the problems I had switching from my old PC (1280x1024 default resolution!) was the problem of screen real-estate. I found that the smaller laptop screen displayed far less items in the finder compared to the 17" LCD screen on the PC.

Then while I was playing with the slider to adjust desktop icon sizes, it hit me: I see less items in the finder because the icons are huge! I shrunk them down to 36x36 and lowered font size to 11pt. Why would Apple ship with huge icons like that? I suppose it's for the same reason they make the dock mandatory?

Speaking of the dock, I found setting it to the left side of the screen give me back some vertical screen space and also keeps my Safari windows centered on the screen.

Does anyone else use a smaller icon size? Or have any other advice on how to reclaim usability lost in the switch to a smaller laptop monitor?

In other news, I played with one of those 30" displays at CompUSA the other day. That was ridiculous!

have you tried using dock hiding so its all the way out of your way? also making full use of expose will help.

You should be able to shrink the size of the dock very small, and then have it magnify whilst the mouse cursor moves over it. It's in your system prefs under Dock.