Dell Mini 9 with OSX - 5 month road test

I picked up a Vodafone version of the Dell Inspiron Mini 9 netbook back in December 2008.  Since then, I've customised the netbook a little (including installing Mac OS X) and brought it with me on my pan-asia adventure.  I'm currently sitting in my guest house room in Penang, Malaysia after traveling 7000 miles,  shooting and sorting 1600 photos and writing countless lines of code, all thanks to the wonderful Mini 9.

Preparing for the adventure
As soon as I first laid eyes on the Mini 9 last year, I fell in love.  At the time, the Mini 9 featured much better build quality than all the other netbooks on the market - this was when the Eee PC and MSI Wind reigned supreme.  The Vodafone variant also had the bonus inclusion of a mobile broadband modem - just slide the SIM card in under the battery, hit connect and you're away.

However, there were a couple of niggles with the Mini 9.  The 8GB SSD storage was feeble - I'm planning on being on the road for a year or two and 8GB just won't cut it.  I couldn't even fit a months worth of snaps on it - it had to go.  I ordered a Runcore 64GB SSD module from the States, popped open the back and replaced the 8GB module.  The Runcore module is much faster than the Dell factory storage device, especially for writing data - which gave the netbook a welcome performance boost.

The second niggle was the operating system - Windows XP Home.  I'm a Mac man, my weapon of choice back in the 'real world' is my wonderful MacBook Pro 17".  I'd read a few articles on running OS X on the Mini 9, and decided to give it a go.  After following the instructions it installed perfectly.  This was in December - the machine had 6 weeks to prove itself well behaved at home before I'd be confident enough to rely on it for the big trip.  It was faultless - not a single kernel panic.  More on this shortly.  I popped everything I need to recover the netbook onto a selection of bootable USB pendrives - including the OSX installer, a copy of Ubuntu (as it can read OSX partitions) and Windows (should the very worst happen) - and tucked them into my bag.  

Packing the rucksack
I left the UK in February - my gadget bag mainly consisted of the following:

• Dell Mini 9
  • Runcore 64GB SSD drive
  • 2GB RAM (upgraded)
  • OS X, with Aperture, Photoshop, Office, Native Instrument's Traktor and a few other utilities installed
• Seagate 120GB USB powered hard drive - for time machine backups, plus USB pen drives for restoring the OS
• Super-lightweight Canon Rebel XT digital camera, plus a couple of luscious 'L' series lenses

Mini 9 in Action
The 9.1" screen and compact keyboard took a little getting used to, but now it's perfectly comfortable for extended netbook sessions.  I can quite happily sit on a train or in my room and type away for a good three hours without discomfort.  The performance of the Mini 9 / OS X is remarkable, for the majority of tasks it's just as snappy as my MacBook Pro.  My favorite feature - that Windows just can't compete with - is that it will quite happily sleep when the lid is shut and instantly spring back into life when the lid is opened up again.

I spend most of my time web browsing, importing and sorting photos in Aperture and building sites in Rails.  Performance is brilliant for most tasks - the most demanding app is Aperture, when crunching thumbnails and previews from the 4GB+ of RAW files that I shoot each month.  In which case I tend to download the photos and let the netbook do its thing for half an hour or so.  Once the previews have been built Aperture's usable, although naturally not as responsive as the MBP - but the netbook is a tenth of the price! Battery life is good - I'm currently getting 2.45 - 3 hours, and I usually push the machine quite hard in that time. 

WiFi reception is great, very handy for the plethora of free hotspots in Asia.  I'm also using the built in mobile broadband modem, the quality of the service varies depending on which network I'm connected to.  It's varied from a frustrating but usable crawl in India, through to super-fast mobile broadband speeds in Singapore.

The Mini 9 with OS X is proving to extremely reliable - I've had just one kernel panic in five months, and that was only when I was tinkering with some new hardware.  It's rare that applications crash - even 'pro' applications such as Aperture and Photoshop very well behaved, given the lightweight power of the Mini 9.  Time Machine is working well - I tend to plug in my external bus powered hard drive every week or so and let it catch up on the changes.

Conclusion
I guess it's pretty obvious that I'm getting on well with the Mini 9.  I've clocked up over 500 trouble-free hours so far, and at no point have I had to reach for my 'recovery' kit.  I'm really pleased with the performance and the machine itself is compact and tough enough to be thrown into a rucksack and hauled onto the roof of an Indian bus.  As much of a Apple fan I am, a little sinister part of me is really enjoying putting two fingers up at Cupertino following Tim Cook's (Apple CEO) comment on netbooks - "When I look at netbooks, I see cramped keyboards, terrible software, junky hardware, very small screens. It's just not a good consumer experience and not something we would put the Mac brand on. It's a segment we would not choose to play in." I think you're missing a trick, Tim.

Click here to pick up a deal on the Dell Inspiron Mini 9