Mike’s Netbook
October 16th, 2009, 10:12pm by MikeDon’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.
October 17th, 2009 at 10:20 pm
One of the awesome things I didn’t notice about the 10v is the power cord, which has a bright white LED on the connector. The LED is lit up whenever the cord is plugged into the wall, which is an AWESOME idea — I can find the cord, and plug it into the machine, in the dark!
October 18th, 2009 at 12:13 am
I like everything I’ve heard about the 10V, except the resolution. Is it still 1024×576?
October 18th, 2009 at 1:03 am
That’s what the Mini 110 is as well. But Win7 sets it to 1024×600. It’s like I’m missing something?
October 18th, 2009 at 9:14 am
Yeah, it’s apparently the lower resolution (1024×576), but I guess that’s the tradeoff of a tiny screen (spacewise). Sounds like the Mini 10 is a more capable netbook than the 10v, but can’t run OS X because of its processor.
Here’s a good rundown.
October 18th, 2009 at 9:33 am
Yeah, it’s apparently the lower resolution (1024×576), but I guess that’s the tradeoff of a tiny screen (spacewise). Sounds like the Mini 10 is a more capable netbook than the 10v, but can’t run OS X because of its processor.
Here’s a good rundown.
October 18th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
No, I mean 1024×576 (true 16:9) as opposed to the 1024×600 that most other netbooks have. I’m reading that newer versions of the 10v and mini 110 are shipping with 1024×600. Not a big deal either way, but I thought it was odd back when I was prospecting netbooks more seriously.
No idea why Jake’s is showing up with 1024×600 as the only option, unless his netbook is actually one of the newer ones, but it was thought that the 1024×600 was only available on custom configure builds. On LCD, though, there’s no way to run at non native resolution, so unless Jake’s desktop can slide up and down, I’d guess that his panel is really 1024×600.
Jake, did you have to install any drivers, video or otherwise? I only had to update the touchpad driver in our Aspire One, or else it wouldn’t have any tap/click-lock features.
October 18th, 2009 at 1:19 pm
Yeah, just installed the trackpad driver, and that was only necessary for the trackpad scroll.
October 18th, 2009 at 1:50 pm
Still not 100% sure about your resolution question. The specs say 1024×576, but like Jake, the OS is saying it’s displaying at 1024×600, and there’s no other option besides 800×600.
Either way, my machine is (intentionally) not a new one — I got a refurb because I specifically wanted the N270 processor (I’m still not sure that the N280 would work — most of the first-gen hackintosh netbooks had the N270, and the next-gen ones that sorta work have the N280 – may be a coincidence). Anyway, I wouldn’t expect it to have the newer screen you’re talking about.
October 18th, 2009 at 4:22 pm
I’m assuming that there is an actual difference in the panels, rather than just a difference in the reported specs. I find it odd that regardless of whether the physical LCD panel is 1024×600 or 1024×576, both OS’s see them as having 600 pxs vertically.