Thursday, April 02, 2009

Cooper

I found a Dell Mini 9 on sale for $198 including tax and shipping the other day. Seeing as this is an easy $50 less than I usually see them, I bought it right away. A few notes.

It arrived with 512MB of RAM. This really wasn't enough. It would work, but not if I wanted to launch more than one application at a time. $30 at NewEgg and now it has 2GB of RAM. It feels very snappy.

It runs Ubuntu Hardy LTS. I can understand why Dell would want me to use an LTS version, but I'm a little nervous about changing the software sources over to Intrepid and giving it an upgrade, even though I'd like some of the new software features.

If I enter a WPA key under my login and then give it to Jillian she needs to enter the WPA key all over again. I understand this is how Keyring works, but what a pain. We'll end up using only one login.

The SD Card slot works great.

Jillian has named it Cooper. This is a break from my normal naming scheme of naming my machines after computer scientists.

The apostrophe key is in a really dumb spot - down just to the right of the space bar. I try to type an apostrophe and I end up hitting the enter key. It would help if I had smaller fingers.

It really does run totally silent (and not that hot). I have trouble telling if it's on sometimes. I'd like solid state drives in all my laptops.

There isn't much space on it. Even after removing a bunch of packages I don't need I still have less than 2GB of storage available.

I didn't realize this, but I often rest my right thumb below the spacebar when I'm typing, and use my left thumb exclusively for hitting the spacebar. This is fine most of the time, but it means my thumb gets dragged on the touchpad of the Mini. I think this is why windows sometimes minimize by themselves and the mouse cursor seems to move around the screen randomly.

Still, I'm happy with it. It's easily half the weight and size of my Toshiba. We'll probably buy a collection of SD Cards or USB drives and mail them back to one of our Parents to keep track of as we go. But this laptop should work fine for writing entries on the blog, even if we need to go a little slower until we're used to the smaller keyboard.

| posted at: 11:00 | permanent link and comments

You can view more entries using the archive links to your left or by looking at our index!