After spending weeks looking for a laptop to use at home for under $400, I finally gave up and ordered a Cherry Red, Dell Inspiron Mini 9 from SamsClub.com. For $254.00 delivered, I got a 9″ netbook with a dual-core 1.6ghz Atom processor, 1 gb of RAM, and 8 gb of Solid State Disk (SSD) that it uses as a hard drive. It also came preloaded with Windows XP Home SP3, which — for a Microsoft product — is still the best Windows out there for the casual user like me. I — for the record — loathe Vista with every fiber of my being, as reinforced by my recent experiment with a Dell Studio 540.
Anyway, for a 9″ screened computer which weighs in at around 2.5 pounds, this thing is pretty snappy, pretty cool, and actually usable. The keyboard, as I’m sure you can imagine, is a bit on the small side for my pudgy fingers, but it’s certainly faster/better than trying to legitimately surf on my iPhone.
So, with the plethora of netbooks out there, why did I choose the Dell Inpiration Mini 9? There were certainly larger (10″), faster notebooks out there with real 160gb hard drives, but for me, it boiled down to two things:
- Price — No one seemed to be able to get near the $245 price tag, unless you counted the president’s day sale direct from Dell, but that one had Ubuntu on it which — in this case — doesn’t really matter when my hopes are finalized (more on that shortly).
- Expandability — Unlike the more popular Acer, EeePC or other netbooks (that I could find), the Dell actually encourages expansion by putting a big door on the bottom of the machine which allows easy access to add more memory, bigger SSD storage, bluetooth card, and even a WWAN (3G) card if you’d like. I already ordered a 2gb RAM stick and 32gb SSD from crucial.com and will probably order 2 more in order to be able to easily jump between operating systems such as Ubuntu, XP, and even maybe, just maybe MacOS X if I get REALLY curious.
As of Tuesday, I’m going on my first road trip with it to DC and will update the blog later with a full “seriously, how usable is a netbook in the real world?” post when I get back (or maybe from the road if I get really, really bored.
