Inspiron Mini 9: March 2009 Archives

Dell may not have the absolute best laptop deals available — you can often do better with the HP/Compaq/Acer/Gateway specials in Office Depot's Sunday newspaper circular (see, there IS a reason to subscribe to a genuine dead-tree newspaper like our own ever-lovin' Los Angeles Daily News).

But Dell is trying to earn your business, and right now (and through April 2) the company is running a "9 great systems under $499" laptop promotion.

True, the $399 Inspiron 13 is no great shakes specs-wise, with a measly 2.13 GHz single-core Celeron processor. But it does feature 1 GB of RAM (barely adequate for the included Windows Vista but quite enough for Linux distributions such as Ubuntu) and a fairly roomy 160 GB hard drive. A 2 GHz Core 2 Duo processor adds $100 to the price, and an extra gigabyte of RAM adds another $50 (yes, Dell SHOULD be ashamed to charge $50 for something that couldn't be costing them more than $10 wholesale), and for $550 you have a very respectable laptop that should serve you for at least three years (or 7-10 years if you're me).

What I'm much more excited about is Dell's Inspiron Mini 9 netbook (pictured above), the price of which has dropped to $249 for the basic Ubuntu Linux/512 MB RAM/8 GB solid-state drive model.

I had the pleasure of trying this very-small but quite usable netbook at the San Fernando Valley Linux Users Group booth at the recent SCALE 7x show, and I was quite impressed with it. I've seen quite a few ultra-small netbooks over the past couple of years -- the Asus Eee PC, the Everex Cloudbook, the HP 2133 Mini-Note, and this Dell is the best one I've encountered yet.

The smallish keyboard, while not super comfortable, is definitely usable, and unlike some other netbooks, the Dell Mini 9 doesn't run hot. It has a nice display and is fairly snappy with Ubuntu GNU/Linux 8.04 (the long-term support edition I'm using on the little girl's Gateway laptop and my extra Toshiba 1100-S101). It handled multimedia well when I saw it, and the small size makes it extremely convenient. It's easier to tuck it in a bag or backpack and open it up at will.

Battery life is supposed to be 4 hours. Not bad, but the talk recently of basing the netxt generation of netbooks on power-sipping ARM processors, like those used in cellphones,
and promising all-day battery life, is something to look forward to.

Anyhow, while the base Dell Mini 9 is $249, bringing the memory up to 1 GB adds only $25 to the cost. (Now you're talking, Dell ...) Going from the 8 GB solid-state hard drive to 16 GB adds an extra $50, but that isn't completely necessary (although I'd probably do it) because you can easily save to those miniature SD cards used in digital cameras — most netbooks have a slot for this — and keep your main drive fairly clean.

One catch with netbooks is that they don't have built-in CD/DVD drives, so you can pop for one from Dell for $89, or take your chances and pick one up for possibly less at Fry's or online from an outlet like TigerDirect.com, where USB-connected CD/DVD burners run from $60-80, or not much of a savings.

Again, if you fully embrace the "netbook concept," you won't need an optical drive or a even a huge main hard drive. These little notebooks are supposed to be for casual Web surfing, jotting down notes and the like.

But I still predict that the netbook will become a whole lot more ubiquitous than many hardware manufacturers and especially software giant Microsoft ever thought.

And while Microsoft is making moves to have an operating system other than Windows XP that will run on such lower-spec devices, I think it's just silently waiting and not-so-silently cajoling hardware makers to up the specs of these little laptops so they can more comfortably run not Windows Vista but the upcoming (and said-to-be-lighter-and-higher) Windows 7.

We'll see. The rumors of a shift from Intel-based processors like the netbook-aimed Atom to even-lower-power-using ARM CPUs could throw a considerable wrench into Microsoft's quest to move into the netbook market — a class of hardware the company didn't see coming.

Right now I still recommend running Ubuntu on those netbooks that ship with that version of the Linux operating system. I've heard less-than-glowing things about the netbooks that use modified versions of Xandros and Linpus, but I'll admit right now that I have nothing beyond the anecdotal to go by.

There are many people interested in running everything from Mandriva and Debian to OpenBSD and Novell's SUSE (either the OpenSUSE or SLED varieties) on their netbooks with the help in many cases of active projects porting these OSes to various netbooks.

Maybe you don't want a netbooks. I understand. I do a whole lot of writing on laptops, and that smallish keyboard might not get such a glowing review when I'm cranking 500-word articles on deadline.

But then again, I do the majority of my work on a 7-year-old Toshiba laptop with a dead sound chip and the ultra-reliable OpenBSD operating system, now equipped with Java and Flash Player 7 (the "newest" Flash player available in the BSD world). Right now the Toshiba — with 1.2 GHz Celeron CPU, 768 MB of RAM and 20 GB hard drive split between OpenBSD and Windows XP, which for testing reasons I haven't killed out — is serving me quite well.

And I always have the Toshiba's "twin," running Ubuntu 8.04, at the ready. And that one even has working sound (and with Ubuntu I have Java and either Flash 9 or 10 – I can't remember). If I have to do more with video than currently (now = almost none), I'll have to move back to Linux both for the Flash capability and the availability of more video-editing software.

But for the basics — Firefox, Opera, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, the Geany text editor, the Xpdf and Adobe PDF readers, the GIMP image editor, Pidgin for IM, gFTP and the Rox-filer file manager — I have a pretty nice setup in OpenBSD. I've been using this OS on this hunk of hardware for about three months now, so I should be in a position soon to write yet another distro review, except this one will be based on that three months of use and not the "I installed it, here's how that went, and here's how it's different from what I usually run" reviews that I and many others find so easy to crank out.

Winding back around to netbooks, what I mean to say is that $250 is a better price than $300 for the basic model, and for that Dell deserves at least some praise (and more than a little business).