Any views on the Dell Inspiron Mini 9?

wadewade

Now that many hotels (especially in USA) are providing free wireless internet I'm wondering about buying one of the new mini laptops like the Dell Inspiron Mini 9. Obviously a lot more convenient than the usual laptop but are the screens big enough to be useful, i.e. can you read webpages and maps without a magnifying lens? Also I'm not familiar with the hardware and software they use, such as "powered by Linux Ubuntu". Is it worth buying one now or should I wait a year for them to develop further.

£199 sounds attractive, but are there other good makes around at this price range?

dreamypuma

wadewade wrote: »

Now that many hotels (especially in USA) are providing free wireless internet I'm wondering about buying one of the new mini laptops like the Dell Inspiron Mini 9. Obviously a lot more convenient than the usual laptop but are the screens big enough to be useful, i.e. can you read webpages and maps without a magnifying lens? Also I'm not familiar with the hardware and software they use, such as "powered by Linux Ubuntu". Is it worth buying one now or should I wait a year for them to develop further.

£199 sounds attractive, but are there other good makes around at this price range?

I'm looking at buying my girlfriend one of these Mini 9's. She's smitten by them.

I think they're a great idea, however I would be inclined to go for a Windows XP version of the machine, for ease of use. Although the XP machines are slightly more expensive, you can pick up a good deal from the Dell Outlet website. They often have a voucher like free delivery and £90 off your order. Last time they had an order like this I was able to find Mini 9's with XP around the £220 mark.

The other thing to be aware of is that the hard disks (or SSD's) on these machines are quite small, around the 8GB mark. Despite being available with XP, they have reletively small storage capacity, usually an 8GB SSD. They also have no optical drive such as DVD or CD Rom. So in esssence they are very much as the name suggests a net book, and not a replacement for a laptop or desktop.

This said, they are fantastic little machines, and ideal for traveller. I'm tempted myself, but just bought a new Inspiron 1525, so can't justify it.

In my opinion, in therms of build quality and value the Dell Mini 9 is excellent. They have a real mini laptop feel, rather than the cheap plastic to like feel of the Acers and Advents.

ManAtHome

The Register has quite a few netbook reviews - start with these:
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/12/11/koy_netbooks/
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/reviews/pc/

More of the older ones are linked in reviews, so a bit of digging should turn up plenty more.

Marty_J

Ubuntu is a wonderful operating system, and I would choose it over Windows any day.

Windows, and its associated anti-virus, anti-spyware, and anti-malware programs, gobble up hard drive space, memory, and processing power. These are all things that are generally in short supply on netbooks (especially the Mini 9).

If you do go for one, I'd advise you to upgrade it a bit over the base model. An 8 GB drive will cost you an extra £20, and taking the RAM to 1 GB would cost an extra £5.

motorguy

Ubuntu is 'ok' but not so good if you want to add anything to it. It took me an evening to make a simple change that could have been done in 2 mins on windows.

i had an Acer Aspire and it WOULDNT play .avi files with the movie player software that was installed. So i read up on installing VLC player, worked out all the other bits that 'they say' to do on the forums, did the download, STILL wouldnt play movies, rebooted itself and hung on startup. So i took it back.

Also, the 'shift' key tends to be tiny on the smaller netbooks, and the keyboards are a lot smaller than normal, which amounts to a lot of missed keystrokes.

History so far :-

Acer Aspire One Ubuntu - bombed so returned
Acer Aspire One XP - ok machine
Dell Mini 9 - poor keyboard and tiny shift key
Samsung NC10 XP - superb machine, great keyboard. Well worth the extra £100

[Deleted User]

I have one and I think it's fantastic, although mine has been upgraded to 2GB RAM and a 64GB SSD drive with much better read/write speeds. If you don't want to drop cash for that you can spend half an hour removing some of the bundled apps and tweaking XP you can have it running with browser, anti virus, IM program etc all taking up less than 400MB of RAM.

If you're so inclined then you can install Mac OS-X with little effort.

In terms of the small shift key, it takes a little while to get used to it but after that it's fine. It's actually bigger than the one on the keyboards I use at work and home for my desktops, they're small for a reason as once you're proficient in using them you don't need such a large key.