Mork,
During preflight, programme your Vnav Climb, ruise and Descent pages as follows. Climb 300/.78; Crusie .79; Descent 300/.79. This will solve the noise problem. Over 300 kts the noise level seems to go up exponentially. Also the autopilot seems to love these airspeeds. VNAV mode does pretty well at these speeds.
When you're getting vectored dogleg to final, Cheat to the Magenta line when "cleared for the approach". If you're given a 30 deggree dogleg and told to intercept the ILS final. Cheat over to a 15 degree intercept before the VOR/LOC capture. The autopilot capture phase is much smoother. This is an old 767 technique.
737 pitch and power figures is "money in the bank'. They work! You don't need the FD. 60% N1 gets you started for most traffic pattern manuevering. 1,3,5,10,15 degrees of pitch work for the climb cruise, descent and GA phase. I'll let you figure out which is which. The intrument crosscheck is still a "T" check despite all the glass.
I used the love the 757/767. Now I'm wild about the 737NG. Give it a bit of time and you'll love it too. The autopilot is a bit on the lame side, like dropping off during the GA or hard turns at altitude, but there's lots of easy ways to cope the things you don't like about it. I've flown AIRBUS', Boeing are much better. How would you like to have an autopilot that you couldn't override with force disconnect switches! That's Airbus, incredible. The best part of flying a Boeing is that you truly feel like a pilot.
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