John's Personal blog
This is my current pc setup.
Nothing special but its good enough for what i need.
Specs are:
Coolermaster Cosmos V2 Case
Intel Q8300 Quadcore 2.5ghz
6GB DDR2 800mhz
Nvidia 8800 GT Graphics Card
2 x Dell 2007FPS Monitors
2 TB Hard Drive Space
Logitech Denovo Edge Bluetooth Keyboard
Logitech MX Revolution Mouse
This will probably last me a while since i no longer game and probably the most strenuous thing i do these days will be video rendering.
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I have had my Dell Mini 9 for a while now so i thought i would share my thought’s on this netbook. The Specification is as follows :
Intel Atom N270 1.6ghz Processor
16GB Pata SSD Hard Drive
Intel GMA 950 Integrated Graphics
1GB ddr2 800mhz Memory (Upgraded to 2gb OCZ 800mhz ram)
8.9” WSVGA Truelife Screen with inbuilt 1.3 mp webcam
4 in 1 Card Reader/ Bluetooth/ Wireless B+G / 10/100 nic
4-Cell 32Wh Li-ion battery (14.8V)
3 Year on Site Warranty
The reason i bought this netbook was that i wanted something small and light whilst travelling rather than taking my Dell XPS laptop with me which was a bit overkill for what i actually required. All i needed was something that I could play the odd movie, browse the internet, FTP to my websites if i needed too as well as RDP to my server at home as well as the normal things writing emails, word docs etc.
The other reason i tend to choose Dell over other laptop/netbook manufacturers is that Dell actually give you restore disks rather than having to create a restore disk from a partition on the hard drive.
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As you can see from above the Mini 9 comes with a glossy black lid which unfortunately the downside being with all laptops/netbooks that come with these is that they are an absolute fingerprint magnet. However the screen is amazingly bright and clear and i was very surprised how good it actually is.
The keyboard is excellent to use with the keys firm and with a short travel on the keystrokes which are also very quiet. One think i do look for in a keyboard is quietness i hate the ones that make a racket as you type.
The trackpad as with every other Dell laptop i have owned is very smooth and responsive with no stutter when in use.
Performance wise the Mini 9 is pretty good and with the extra memory applications tend to run pretty smoothly and open instantaneously. I did try Firefox initially as that has been my browser of choice for awhile now but was a little sluggish to start up. I decided to install Google Chrome to see how quickly that started compared to Firefox. To my surprise Chrome was instant which i could not believe so that has now stuck as my browser of choice for the netbook.
Another program i find essential is a picture editing program as i like to be able to adjust my pics (crop, resize etc) and i knew Photoshop would just not perform well on a netbook nor Photoshop Essentials, Instead i settled for a program that is a few years old now as it does exactly what i need it to do which is Jasc (or Corel as we now know it) Paintshop Pro 7. This opens in about 3 secs so it is not too bad on resources.
The one other good thing about the dell mini 9 is it is very easy to Hackintosh as long as you use a retail disk. You can find a lot of information over at mydellmini forums here
All in all i am very happy with my dell mini and it does everything that i want it to do very well. If i was to give it marks out of 10 bearing in mind what it is actually designed for it would be a solid 8.
