A lot of people have stopped me and asked me about the Dell Mini over the last few days. Ok, fine, maybe I was flaunting it at MLA a little bit and I’ve been going on endlessly about it on Twitter, but it’s completely deserving.
Let me state for the record, I do not have an IT background, I am a slightly more Techie than average person but that’s it. The opinions expressed in here are based on my love of the Mini & the hour or so of research I did to find out about solid state hard drives. I have only had the Mini for 7 days & I reserve the right to change my mind, update or modify my opinion at any time
Why I wanted/needed the Mini:
For the last year I’ve been painfully aware that I needed a new laptop. Now I have a desktop, a fine workhorse of a machine with a 19 inch monitor and plenty of hard drive space left. So I don’t technically need a laptop, but I travel a fair amount and I enjoy working from my sofa or kitchen table or local coffee shop or brewery on occasion. If I wanted to keep enjoying this option I needed a new laptop. But I was torn, I didn’t really need a high end one and even the low end ones were expensive & still pretty big.
Enter the Mini a couple of weeks ago. I decided with MLA, Internet Librarian, a trip to Malaysia in the works & teaching a class in the Spring, it was now or never & the mini was everything I wanted – small, light & Internet ready. So I ordered one & never looked back.
The specs on mine:
- Inspiron 910 Intel Atom processor N270, 1.6GHz, 533Mhz512K L2 Cache
- 1GB,DDR2,533MHZ,1 DIMM
- 8.9 inch Wide Screen WSVGA TLLCD
- Intel Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) 950
- 16GB Solid State Drive (mini-card Module/PATA)
- Genuine Windows XP Home Edition
- Wireless 802.11g Mini Card
- Integrated 1.3M Pixel Webcam
- McAfee Security 9.0, 30-day Subscription – uninstalled & installed my software of choice
- 32WHr 4-cell Battery
- Microsoft Works 9.0 – worthless using OpenOffice
- small
- light
- fast
- easy
- does everything I need or want
- attractive, or cute
- Kensington lock slot & I ordered one right away. I never really worried to much about locking my other laptops down, but someone would walk by, pick this up with one hand tuck in a pocket or under a jacket & be gone in 30 seconds, so I will be locking it up.
- the placement of the apostrophe – seriously bad choice on Dells part, what the heck were they thinking?
- How is the battery? – Good, it could be better, but so could all laptops. It lasted all day at the MLA conference, we’ll know about IL soon enough.
- How is the Keyboard? – surprisingly easy to use. It might be an issue for people with larger hands, but it seemed pretty comparable to the 17 inch Gateway.
- Why didn’t I get Ubuntu? – At the time it showed it as a “pre-order” option which meant to me it wasn’t available yet, and I wanted mine like yesterday.
- What does Solid State Hard Drive mean? – er, well I did a bit of research & here’s what I found – “A solid state drive is designed to act just like a hard drive as far as the user or the computer is concerned (and even looks similar on the outside), but it has no moving parts. SSDs have no spinning platters; instead they are based on flash memory” and “SSDs are faster than hard drives (up to hundreds of times faster), use less power, and weigh less than traditional spinning hard drives. They don’t crash when you drop them, and they don’t make any noise” – http://tech.yahoo.com/blog/null/65761
- Why didn’t I get something with more hard drive space? You’re right they are out there.
- I dont’ need it. I have a desktop that’s awesome, a 360 gig portable hard drive, endless flash drives and SD memory cards. I don’t know what I’d put on here that would use up the 16 gigs of hard drive space I have. Anything will be migratory, a presentation, a photo whatever.
- From my research about SSD vs traditional hard drives, a SSD is faster, always good and more sturdy, great for something I’ll be carrying in my purse.
Librarian by Day 
Leave a comment