Corporealshift

Dell Mini 12: First Impressions

So I finally cracked and purchased a netbook. I decided to go with a dell mini 12, which as many other reviews have said ‘blurs the line’ between netbook and notebook. I chose this model because I wanted something to top my three hour battery life of my current laptop, but retain a full (1280×800) resolution screen. So it finally showed up at my doorstep a week ago, and of course I immediately started playing with it.

I opted for the slower 1.33ghz atom processor, 1gb of RAM(unfortunately, this is the max they offer), the 60gb hard drive, and it comes with bluetooth and wifi built in. I chose to go with linux, and it came loaded with ubuntu 8.04 and a dell GUI overlay which I immediately disabled. The RAM is not upgradable, and the hard drive is a relatively slow, 1.8″ 4200 RPM ATA interface drive. The keyboard is almost a full size keyboard and my only complaint is that the period, comma, and forward slash keys are 2/3 the size of the other keys. I have consistently been hitting two of the keys instead of just one, but it feels as though a bit more time with the machine will make these issues go away. It has 3 USB ports, VGA out, mic and headphone jacks, built in 10/100 LAN, and an SD/MMC/MemoryStick card reader. It also has a webcam and onboard mic; really the only thing missing from this machine is a CD/DVD drive, but that is to be expected on a netbook.

Capabilities

I bought this machine for surfing the web and typing up notes for class or any other simple tasks I want it to do. Battery life was important for me, so I chose the 6-cell battery which seems to run about 5 hours of normal use(wifi and bluetooth enabled and active). For text editing, web surfing, or any other ‘basic’ tasks this machine is more than capable. Load times are relatively slow which I have ascribed to the slow hard drive, but once applications are up and running the machine runs perfectly. As far as capabilities go, I have not really tested the limits of the machine but it does run Open Arena, a game very similar to Quake III Arena at relatively high framerates. It runs this game significantly better than I would have expected, but I have not run any kind of performance tests to see just how powerful it is.

Problems

There are some issues with this model. First and most important to me is that it will not run either Virtual Box or Wine, so I couldn’t even test performance on these applications. Apparently these applications do not support the machine type, and I haven’t had a chance to discover exactly why that is. One small complaint is that Dell does not offer a solid state option. I know that you could replace the drive with other SSD options, but I wish Dell would offer it instead of this archaic drive. My other complaint, is that although the machine is incredibly thin, the larger battery attaches in such a way to make it look much less thin. I would have preferred that the larger battery would stretch further from the back of the machine and lay flat than prop up the machine like it does.

Conclusion

However, the machine is dead silent; there are no fans on the case at all. It runs amazingly cool and is never even warm to the touch. If making the battery hold the computer up at the angle that it does makes it so the machine does not require fans or does not even get moderately warm, that is a fair compromise for me.

All in all, this machine has surpassed my expectations in performance and design. As I discover its limitations and more of just what this little machine can do, I will discuss in more detail its performance limitations. However, at $449(with ubuntu) this is a great little machine if you want a netbook but want a larger screen and keyboard.

I’ve included several pictures below in case you want to see what it looks like.

Pictures

Tags: Computers, Dell Mini, Linux, Mini 12, Netbook, Ubuntu

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 28th, 2009 at 12:23 am and is filed under Computers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.