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Non Mac conquest - Dell Mini 10!

B

BlastoiseBlue

6502
Not sure how folks around here handle non-Mac stuff being conquested and whatnot, but today I "traded" (More like was constantly buggered into trading...) my Thinkpad x61t for my sister's Dell Inspiron Mini 10.

It's the Nickelodeon edition, which I'm not really a big fan of... I plan on ordering a stock blue lid and regular palmrest if I keep it. It also needs a new keyboard.

I have been having a little trouble with something, namely the wireless drivers. I got Windows XP Pro SP3 on it VIA USB, but it didn't detect my wireless card and none of the drivers from the Dell support page for the Mini 10 seem to work... The Dell diagnostic tool says it's a Broadcom 802.11g card...

 
Grab a newer Windows, it'll run well.

Alternatively, a Linux distro will work well after installing Broadcom firmware. Set up a relative's Mini 9 with that.

 
I finally got XP on it, can't go Linux because I plan on using it as a diagnostic companion for my New Beetle when I get it. (The tool only runs in Windows.) I can't upgrade to a higher version because it only has one gig of RAM, it can take two but I don't have a 2GB for it. :c

 
The mydellmini.com boards are a wealth of info about those machines. Be sure to check out all the forums there. There are interesting Mac-related things that certain Dell Mini 10s are useful for.

 
Windows 7 should run in just one gig of ram (whereby "should" I mean I actually have run it in 384mb.) If you're just running a single diagnostic tool, then a gig should be fine. In fact, it's said that Windows 8 does even better with low clock speeds and memory situations than 7, but I haven't taken a bunch of time to really compare this on netbook or old ThinkPad hardware. (Which I call out specifically simply because that's what I have on hand.)

Likewise, if you're just running a single diagnostic tool, it should be fine without a network connection if the slight improvement in XP's responsiveness on that hardware is more worthwhile than networking.

Anyway, let us know how it goes. Netbooks can be good single-purpose computers. The one I have, which is an eeePC 901HA (Atom N270, 1gb/160gb) I usually use attached to the back of a monitor as a sort of thin client.

 
It kind of depends on which particular version you've got, but most of the Atom Z series processors were actually worse at a lot of things than the N270 from the mini 9 and other netbooks at the time. This was back in the days when you really did have to choose between having enough horsepower to run a lot of things, and battery life. The Z series atoms and the NM10 chipset prioritized battery life above all else.

The one to look for might be the model based on the N450/N455 processor, but to be honest, gaming and netbooks aren't really compatible concepts.

 
I'm pretty sure I could run it on the Acer Aspire One I had around the same time as when this one was built. (although it looked to be about an inch wider, but a lot thinner!) I was hoping maybe I just hadn't found the right graphics drivers since the screen always looks squished, like it's a 4:3 screen stretched to fit widescreen. Either way I guess I could just put DOSBox on it or something... I might see if a friend of mine will swap his Mini 9 for this one.

 
So? If the Aspire One you had was based of the 945 and N270 or a newer chipset and the N450/455 or the (even later) D/N 2x00 series chips, then this makes sense because those chipsets prioritize performance a little bit more. Also, the N450/455 and D/N 2x00 series chips are newer enough that they've got some of the performance properties of the N270 coupled with some of the power saving properties of the Atom Z series.

Anecdotally, Intel Atom has gotten totally insane, and I've got a device with the Z3470, which is a quad core SoC, that should have no problems running things like World of Warcraft. (I don't know if this has been confirmed, but I intend to try it on my own device in the near to medium distance future.) Without running things like WoW, the devices these days charge off of MicroUSB and get 10 hours of battery life while running regular desktop applications like PuTTY and Office 2013.

The N2x700 series, which appeared in the later AspireOnes and a few other of the only remaining netbooks in 2011 or so had reasonable battery life and from what I recall, okay performance, but they did this at the "cost" of being almost as big as a regular laptop, like an X Series ThinkPad.

 
Lol, now this has got me wanting to collect netbooks... :p

Too bad it's only getting amazing as all the manufacturers are phasing out their netbook lines in favor of tablets and convertibles... Sure, we still have ultrabooks, but it just isn't the same. Seems $399 is starting price for a "subcompact" laptop these days. I might just look for an older Thinkpad Edge or something.

 
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