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December 30 Dell Mini9: Part II I've had the new system for almost a week now and I love it. I have gotten used to the smaller keyboard much faster than I expected -- in fact using a full size keyboard now seems cumbersome because my fingers need to move so much further when typing. I never typed with much more than four fingers and my thumbs anyway so I suspect the transition was much easier for me than someone who actually types correctly. That's not to say that there are no issues with typing on a keyboard that small. First, Dell had to move some of the keys to non-standard locations which makes it difficult to type in the dark. On a regular keyboard I am pretty much able to type away because I know where everything is, but with the small keyboard I have to stop and actually look for certain keys. Which ones give me the biggest issues? Trying to type an apostrophe and quotation marks because they key has been moved from the left side of the Enter key down to the right of the spacebar. I would have rather seen the colon and semicolon key moved to that location and kept the apostrophe and quotation marks key closer to its normal location. I also struggle with the idea of needing to use the function (Fn) key and the plus/equals key to get a backslash. I use UNC paths (\\server\share) all the time to access locations on my network and having to do a two-key combination is a bit of a pain. The forward slash key is exactly where you would expect to find it, as one would expect with a laptop designed heavily for Internet use. By the way, don't run Internet Explorer in full-screen mode because there does not appear to be any F11 (or F12) key to get back to normal display. My only other challenges with typing are on the left side of the keyboard. Having the Tab, Shift, and Caps Lock keys half the width of normal may save room, but I forever find myself typing Q, A or Z when aiming for those keys. I have loaded up the unit with the software I have needed and disk space has not been an issue so far. My system is running with slightly less than 10GB of disk space used, leaving me well over 4GB of free space. If I get a new digital camera before vacation I may have issues offloading files from the camera to the local drive, but given how cheap SD cards are, I should be able to get around that easily enough. Speaking of SD, having an integrated card reader was a great touch and one I wish my D620 had built-in. We took the unit on the road yesterday for the first time and I pleased to note we had no problems reading the screen outdoors in the sunlight. As for software, I have pretty much got my full load on there now: Truecrypt 6.1a: Just finished encrypting the system drive. Will be interesting to see if I see an impact on performance. FoxIt Reader: Need something to read PDF files and this program can't be beat right now. Firefox 3: I tried going "all Microsoft" but I missed my Firefox extensions. Thunderbird 2: Windows Live Mail trying to access GMail via IMAP was painful. Thunderbird is wonderful. Garmin Mapsource: Loaded my City Navigator 2008 as well as the Topo Maps. Back in business with my GPS! GPicSync 1.26: Need something for geo-tagging my photos and this one is free and simple. Geocaching Swiss Army Knife: This is THE application I need this system to run. Can't geocache without it. TweetDeck: Has become my Twitter client of choice. Virtual CloneDrive: A must-have for a machine without an optical spindle -- load everything via ISO images. I also did my standard MS upgrades: IE7, WindowsMedia Player 11, Windows Live Messenger (Beta) and Windows Live Photo Gallery. This little unit just keeps humming along and has exceeded my expectations thus far. When I do sit down to use my Dell Latitude D620 it seems like an absolute monster with the weight to match! December 24 Dell Mini9: First ImpressionsMy Christmas present to myself arrived today – my ultra small laptop from Dell. My goals for this new machine are two-fold: 1) Remove all of my personal software and email from my main work laptop (Dell Latitude D620) 2) Use this for new laptop for Geocaching and in-vehicle navigation. (All my GPS toys, basically.) My first impression, even before opening the box was “Wow, this thing is tiny!” The Purolator tag showed the entire contents weighed just four lbs. The box it shipped in was so small I swore only half the package had arrived – I swear I’ve seen hard drives get shipped in bigger boxes. Dell seems to have fallen into the Apple trap – what is with the shiny surface on this thing? I can’t even remove it from its wrapping without getting it messed up with finger prints. Note to vendors – these things are tools, not fashion accessories. I don’t need designer colors and I don’t need shiny surfaces. Leave that to the Mac people. I plugged it in and fired it up right away. I had to go through the initial Windows XP screens for accepting the EULA and things, nothing major. I wish there had been a 2GB of RAM option – had there been I likely would fire up Vista on it. Say what you want about Vista, it has been the victim of word of mouth more than actual bad experiences. I have run Vista since it was first released to volume-license customers more than two years ago and, while there were compatibility problems in those early months with third-party drivers and software, it has been a rock-solid OS for me. I much prefer it to XP – XP might be the best OS Microsoft ever released, but it is getting long in the tooth and shows its age. Anyway, I’ll run XP on it for now and see how it goes. The system detected my wireless network right away. I had no issue typing in my ultra-secure WPA2 key on the tiny keyboard, although I find the touchpad to be a bit small – I seem to need to lift my finger in order to scroll the mouse pointer from one side of the screen to the other. I’ll eventually see if I can fix this by adjusting the sensitivity in the Control Panel. I may also just resort to using a USB mouse when working at a table or desk. An initial check of the 16GB C: drive showed 3.79GB in use. Pretty good. I noticed that the contents of C: have been compressed. I’m not a big fan of compression, but I’ll leave it intact for now. Wow, there are a lot of things running in my system tray. C’mon, with only 1GB of RAM to play with, I need to tighten this up a bit more. Software which I removed right away: - Adobe Reader 8.1 (FoxIt has been eating Reader’s lunch for a long time now – I’m amazed anyone uses Reader anymore.) - Dell Support Center (Sorry Dell, I’m my own support depot. If it ain’t hardware related you ain’t ever gonna know about it.) - Google Desktop / Google Toolbar (They don’t offer me anything I can’t get elsewhere already.) - McAfee Security Center (Well, it’s better than Norton, but it still burns more resources than it is worth.) - Microsoft Works (Haven’t used it in years. (OpenOffice will work fine for me if I decide I need Office-type functionality later.) - Microsoft Office PowerPoint Viewer 2007 - Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 (I’ll install then again if something needs the older version, but for now I’ll just leave 2.0 and 3.0 on here. I tried to get rid of 2.0 but it says some installed app needs it so it won’t let me remove it.) Software which well get removed if I don’t need it: - Dell Webcam Central, Live! Cam Avatar Creator, Dell Video Chat, Dell Box.net Launcher So, what is the net result of all these removals? A 16% reduction in used space – the system now is using just 3.17GB of space. Might not sound like a lot, but when you are only playing with 16GB total every bit helps. If nothing else the system should run a bit leaner without all that bloatware kicking around. Next steps? Well, I’m going install Virtual CloneDrive so I can start mounting some ISO images and getting my software on there… |
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