Don’t want to steal Jake’s thunder by putting this in his thread, but have to put this somewhere for posterity.
I’m posting from my new netbook, a Dell Mini 10v running Mac OS 10.6.0. So far, so good — for the most part everything works, but there are a few minor rough edges, as far as I can tell.
If anybody wants to try to duplicate my work, head to the Dell Outlet, where you can search by individual machines, and look for a Dell Mini 10v with:
- Atom N270 processor (not sure whether the 280 works — the 270 is what’s in the Wind, the HP Mini 1000, and many of the other hackable netbooks.
- b/g/n card. Seems like fun. If you don’t care about n, you may be able to save a few bucks.
I got the refurbished (not “previously ordered new” to save a couple more bucks). Also found a coupon for 15% off. $254 all in. When you get the machine, check the BIOS version, and if it’s higher than A05, downgrade. Things don’t work well with A06.
The installation was about as easy as it could be, provided you have a Mac. Starting from here, I followed these instructions pretty much straight through. I installed Snow Leopard using the $30 upgrade disk I bought for my home machine.
Overall, it works well, and could totally be a day-to-day machine. There are a couple of little annoyances:
- Apple knows that they don’t make a machine with a display as short as netbooks, so their dialog boxes and pref panes sometimes extend below the bottom of the screen. I can see this being a problem in some cases, but so far, I’ve been able to work around it the couple of times it’s happened.
- Doesn’t wake from sleep if you just close the lid, but if you put it to sleep, then close the lid, it wakes up fine on lid opening.
- The sound works, but clearly is a hack. There are some weird clicks when UI sounds are initiated.
So, overall, I’m really happy with the machine. It’s so damn small and light that I can see taking it with me in a backpack or on a non-work trip. The built-in SD card reader is nice, and will work great. With an additional 1 GB of memory, it’s really gonna rock.