I started back at school after being out for almost two years. We owned a Dell Inspiron 1420 that we bought for Carrie in January 2008. She uses it exclusively for everything she does. I have used my desktop tower almost exclusively during the same time period. When it came time to go to class four days each week, me taking her laptop was out of the question by my decision.
I bought my son an EeePC 901 for Christmas 2008 and used it for the first two weeks of class. The keyboard on the Eee was so small, I could not type accurately, so I decided I would get something else that was mine, and I could use it for whatever I needed done.
It finally arrived on January 31, and I was excited. Here are my unboxing pictures.
The Mini9 tucked nicely inside
The power supply is tiny, compared to the typical laptop charging power supply
The first look.
Size comparison between my N810 and the Mini9
My Dell Inspiron 1420n 14″ laptop and the Mini9 comparison
Same hardware comparison opened up.
My son’s EeePC 901 and my Mini9 are almost the exact same size. The Mini9 is about 1/4 inch (0.6 cent) wider than the Eee is, but it also looks much nicer too. The EeePC looks very utilitarian, and the 9 is just very sleek.
The screen is amazingly bright and clear. It is lit by LED’s so it is much brighter than any other screens I own.
This is the default startup desktop. I was hoping that a regular Gnome desktop could be used rather than the dumbed down “MiniOS” that dell ships with the Linux version. There us a very prominent option in the main menu to change the layout and use the regular Gnome desktop. Good move Dell.
The keys are surprisingly easy to type with. The main keys are larger than the punctuation and other less frequently used keys. There are a couple of the keys that have been moved to awkward positions, but I assume that they did this because the F-Keys have been moved to the home row. You have to use the “Fn” to use the function keys, but that is no big deal.
There is only one thing I do not like about it, and it is just a stupid decision by Dell and it is their famous crapware. When you open Firefox you are taken straight to Yahoo.com and the Yahoo tool bar is installed. You can NOT remove it, just disable it. I tried to erase the entire .mozilla folder and it did the same thing. There are many other junk offers in the MiniOS desktop, which is such a disappointment.
This Mini9 uses the Intel Atom 270 processor and so does the EeePC I own. The Mini9 runs so much faster than the Eee does. I was not expecting the performance that it puts out, but it does.
I love it and would not hesitate to buy another one if I needed it.
