My good friends at Dell hooked me up with an Inspiron Mini 9 laptop/netbook to use for participating in and blogging about the National Novel Writing Month. It is a pretty sweet, tiny machine.
My wife wants to use it all the time! I'm going to have to distract her somehow during November. She seriously is crazy about it. It came with Ubuntu Linux on it, but I swapped out the 4GB flash disk for the 16GB flash disk that comes with the high-end XP Pro config. I also factory-installed XP and loaded Word. Nothing against Linux, per se, but I want to use Word for this project.
The Mini 9 is sturdier than I expected, and I like the fit and finish. It comes in black and white, and this one is white, which looks pretty nice.
The drawback? I'm a touch-typist, and I'm a little concerned about the keyboard. To get everything in a package that small, some of the keys had to be reduced. This may not be a problem for many, but I am using it in what amounts to a typing contest (of wills), and my large hands and I will soldier on and report back how it goes.
After a week of configuring it, hooking it up to wireless, browsing, and email, I like it. It feels solid and the keyboard is sturdy, albeit cramped on the sides. It is the smallest laptop I've ever used. Actually, I love that it is so small when I'm carrying it around, and I can use something other than my huge XPS backpack.
5 comments:
Looking forward to seeing it tonight!
See you at D-Lair for the "typing contest".
I hope you are wrong about that as I'm a horrible "typist".
Then again, I'm a horrible writer too! Why again did I allow you to talk me into this?
You know... even though the picture you provided had dimensions, it didn't fully sink in until I saw this computer last night at the midnight write just HOW small it is.
Man, is this thing TINY.
I think you inadvertently convinced a half dozen people last night to buy one. :)
Yeah - they seemed to like it. I'm trying to get that post up now.
How well does this stack up to the MSI Wind?
@Kelvin, I'm going to have to check the stats - since the Mini 9 wasn't my project, I didn't get in on the development side of it. I'm just borrowing this one from Marketing.
.trey
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