Dell Inspiron Mini 9 Netbook Computer

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Anthony Fiti
Brian

Jan. 27, 2009

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Note: You may want to check out our guide to choosing the right netbook in addition to this article for even more information.

Usage

One of the first things I noticed after about 30 minutes with my netbook is that I have poor eyesight, and how big of an impact this would have with anyone who has poor eyesight. The 9" screen has a resolution of 1024x600, and I'm having a hard time reading it, even with glasses. This might not be an issue for most of our readers, but for older folks and those with really bad eyesight it could be a big issue. Not being able to read the screen is a critical issue that would negate any use of the device. So get your eyes checked and your prescription updated if you fall into that category.

The next thing that jumps out at you is the keyboard layout. A number of keys are shrunk, moved or removed to accommodate the smaller footprint. The biggest annoyance I've found is that the backslash key is a function-key - if I need to type the backslash key, instead of just tapping the key like on a normal keyboard, I have to hit Fn-+, which will type backslash. Other keys demoted to Fn-status are the curly braces { } and square braces [ ], along with the insert key, page up, page down, home, end, tilde and apostrophe (~ `), and F1-F10 (there is no F11 or F12 on this keyboard). One major key that was moved from the home row to the space bar row is the single/double quote key. In a little time spent testing trying to write and debug some JavaScript, using the Fn key instead of Shift to get the curly braces was a little weird, but not being able to step into a subroutine with F11 was a big issue.

Performance wasn't bad, especially after the RAM was upgraded to 2GB from 512MB. With that respect, its very similar to laptops - because the factory hard drive (in this case the SSD) is slower than what's found in the conventional desktop PC (7200RPM), paging to the hard disk when you run out of memory is a bigger performance hit. The more RAM you can throw at the computer, the less it will page out to the storage mechanism. Benchmarks will appear later in this article.

Storage was initially an issue - as the devices only come with an 8GB drive. Even upgrading to a 16GB SSD offered some relief; you're still left with only 6-10GB of free space. If that is an issue, one cheap remedy would be to use a class 6 SDHC card (8 or 16GB) to store data, music and movies. The cards are relatively small and you can leave one in the laptop, effectively doubling your storage space. The class 6 cards are more than fast enough to playback movies and music, they're fast enough to not annoy you with the amount of time it'll take to load up a card with 8 or 16GB worth of media files.

One last thing to consider is how this device overlaps with the laptop and smartphone segments of the marketplace. One thing that I was able to do when I got my iPhone was to not worry about taking my laptop on short trips - the iPhone and most other smartphones can take care of mail and basic internet browsing that would otherwise require a laptop, and the laptop was far too heavy to carry for what little it offered above my iPhone's capabilities. The netbook segment fits in between the smartphone and the laptop - for a few day trip where I might need or want full internet access, type up some notes (not write a novel), or even watch movies, its light and small.

The Forbidden Fruit

The most alluring thing about this laptop is installing OS X on it without major issues. This may vary depending on how much you like OS X, but for someone like me its great. I must tip my hat to the fine folks at the MyDellMini.com forums, specifically Type11 who has been working hard to restore features to the Mini inside OS X.

From start to finish the installation took about 90 minutes - this does not include any research or prep time, but it does include time for installing updates and getting the system fully functional. There are several things you'll learn as you proceed. First is to make sure you do a customized installation and remove X11, extra printer drivers and languages. The first time I installed OSX, I didn't remove any of these extra features during the install and I was left with a whopping 1GB free on my 16GB SSD when I was done. This wasn't even enough to perform updates (apparently OSX needs a ton of drive space when performing updates to "optimize" the system files). The second time I installed OSX I removed all the non-essential parts of the operating system and was left with much more free space.

Remove all the unnecessary data from the system can be time consuming. Initially after I was done with the installation and patching I had about 6GB free. First I removed the 2GB file that stores RAM contents during "safe sleep" (which I disabled, via pmset -a hibernatemode 0, though if I lose power when its asleep I will lose anything not saved). However, installing applications like Microsoft Office can quickly eat away at that savings. After installing a set of popular Mac applications (Office, Firefox, Adium X, etc), I was back to that 6GB figure. Using programs like Trimmit to squeeze down applications, and using a file size auditing tool like Grand Perspective helps figure out what is eating your drive space. Trimmit was able to reduce Mail.app from 268MB to 21MB, and iTunes from 129MB to 34MB. Both apps worked just fine after the size reduction. Removing the voice file (unless the sound of your Mac talking to you amuses you) saves another 700MB. After installing my applications, trimming, squeezing, and taking out the trash, I was able to arrive at 7.35GB free on my 16GB (14.6GB usable) SSD. Not too bad, a little over half empty. With this, I can add some music, simple games, and some movies (at a lower resolution to save space) to keep me entertained - plus any extra media on an 8 or 16GB SDHC card.

One major pain was the demotion of the tilde character to a Fn combination. This is a big issue on the Mac because Command-~ is used to switch between windows in an application - between multiple Finder or Firefox windows for example. Having this key relegated to a Fn combination makes switching between windows in an application a huge pain - require a 3 key combination, Command (alt on the keyboard)-Fn-W. Its not the most comfortable key combination, in fact its relatively difficult to pull off with your left hand without rotating it around.

Performance of the operating system is fantastic. Considering that Leopard can run on old G4-based 867MHz PowerPC Macs, its no surprise that it cruises along on the 1.6Ghz Atom chip. Installing an adequate amount of memory is a must to keep the system from paging (this goes for Windows too).

In using basic applications (Safari, Firefox, MS Office), I didn't have any issues with the performance of the system. It wasn't sluggish or unresponsive. Video decoding was a little more strenuous, but I didn't have any problems with MPEG 2, H.264 at 272x480 (iPhone) or 480x720 (DVD) resolutions. I was able to decode H.264 720p video, but the system dropped frames in both Quicktime and VLC. Finally, Youtube and other flash video websites worked in Safari and Firefox with Flash 10 fairly well, as long as the video wasn't 720p or higher. Windows performed the same, except for 720p video, which would only run at 1 or 2 frames per second.

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Page 1: Introduction, Specifications & Upgradability
Page 2: Usage & The Forbidden Fruit
Page 3: Performance, Power Consumption & Battery Life
Page 4: Conclusion

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Add Comment

2 User Comments

1 - Posted by aireiq on January 27, 2009 - 3:25 pm

Suggestion. Link this:

"check out our Netbook Guide"

to your actual netbook guide.

Thanks

2 - Posted by Kurtis on January 27, 2009 - 3:47 pm

Good point, Eric. Added. :)

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