Dell Mini9 Netbook

My netbook came in yesterday just after lunch and I have been playing with it for the last 24 hours. I have to say that it is pretty nice to use. Absolutely no noise since it doesn't have a fan nor a hard drive. There are a lot of other things that are missing as well such as no optical drive and a weird keyboard. But it only weighs 2¼ pounds and has everything I need on a daily basis such as email, wireless access, three USB ports, LED backlit screen and about 4 hours of battery life. The SSD drive is only 32 GB so probably no MS Office applications for now. Plus, I do like the shiny, red color.

Oh yeah, I installed Mac OS X on it just to see how well it works. I followed the directions on the Gizmodo site which seemed pretty straightforward and it worked like a charm. It is now running 10.5.7 (most recent update) and everything seems to work just fine. It came with Ubuntu installed and I played with it for a while and they seem to have done a good job. A lot of applications usually needed were there. But I was looking for something more familiar since I have been using OS X ever since it came out. From everything I've heard, it would probably work pretty well. So far, I like it a lot. It syncs with my iPhone just fine which is a whole lot more than I can say about my Windows PC which always wants to reformat everything rather than simply work with what's there. This really is a reasonable travel option for me since I can sync and reload my phone if it gets all messed up. I also installed a bunch of music from my laptop iTunes collection and will probably install some sort of productivity. Maybe Openoffice. The only real negative is the keyboard has one key in an unexpected location. The apostrophe key is on the bottom row with the space bar and the Windows key (now an option key). The smaller size has been pretty easy for me to get used to especially since I don't type very well anyway. I'm typing this post on the Dell trying to run down the battery. I think it is going to last about 3½ hours. And this is with the wireless running the entire time watching some online videos, cleaning out my iTunes library, and general surfing. I think that this is a great "second" computer since the built in drive is too small to be your primary machine.

On another note, this afternoon, I walked to a some friends home where they were having a graduation party, Things have really greened up around here. I think it was about 70°F this afternoon and felt almost too hot to walk anymore. I guess I'm just getting spoiled.