Drooling over the Dell Mini 9
New Laptop
Since I reviewed available netbooks about two months back several new options have opened up.1 There’s the new Samsung NC11023 and a slew of new Acer One’s.
However, none of them can touch the 4GB Dell Mini 9 on sale right now for $199 with Ubuntu.
I know I had earlier said that 8GB was too small for my purposes. I had even suggested that I was more interested in some of the other available netbooks over the Dell for this reason. However, I want to make my next computer a Dell, true to my word.
The reason I’m considering the 4GB version where I was dismissing the 8GB version before is the incredible price and the purposes to which such a laptop would be put. In order to do about 98% of what I need with a laptop, I could easily use a netbook. On any given day I use:
- Firefox for web browsing
- Thunderbird for e-mail
- Pidgin for instant messaging
- FileZilla for FTP transfers
- Notepad++ for programming/text editing
- OpenOffice for word processing, spreadsheets
- TightVNC for remote access
All of these programs are open source software and available for Ubuntu4 and Windows. So, in shopping for a laptop, I really don’t care about which operating system I use. The 4GB Dell Mini 9 with Ubuntu could do all of these things – and for a $199 price tag. Plus, with the Mini’s SD card slot, I could pop in an extra 16GB of memory for only $26.
- Photo courtesy of Ciccio Pizzettaro [↩]
- The Samsung NC110 is the successor to the NC10 [↩]
- A review of the NC110 I found helpful [↩]
- An easy-to-use Liniux installation. [↩]