Dell Inspiron Mini 9" Netbook 8GB

Sam's has a great price on this. For those who have one or know more about it, I have a question. Is the OS on a seperate drive than the 8BG drive? It sounds like the 8GB drive is removable and replaceable. 8GB isn't a lot and if the Windows OS is on it, there wouldn't be much room for anything.

I would stick with the 120 or 160 g hd windows xp version of any of the netbooks .After reading posts on the SSD versions of these netbooks they seem to be for advanced users.

I ordered the one from Sam's - just couldn't resist anymore at $245. I already have a fullsize laptop, and a few desktops in the house - this will be just for "play", and internet while on vacation. So even the 8G should be plenty.

It was either the mini or a Kindle - I have been eyeing both of them. If the books were less expensive for the kindle that would have been my choice

It's a SSD or solid state drive rather than your typical hard drive and, your right, there won't be any room on it with Windows. I purchased a 16 GB drive and only have 8 GB of room to work with. To compensate I purchased a 250 GB external portable plug and play hard drive.

For me, this set up works well. I use my laptop when we trave for pictures and surfing the internet. The portable hard drive will store tons of photo's and makes them very portable. I probably would have been better off purchasing one of the Acer or Assus models that have regular hard drives with considerably more space but, it was a matter of trusting the brand and I know very little about those two brands. We've had good luck with our HP's so we decided to go that route, even though it was a little more expensive.

You can clean off a LOT of Windows bloatware and save quite a bit of room on a limited hard drive. I own an Asus eeepc, (the one that started all this mini netbook fuss), and it came with a 4gb drive. I deleted the Linux partition, and installed XP in its place, per the instructions Asus provided. By the time all was said and done, the scaled down Windows version loaded in less than 1gb of hard drive space.

To augment things, like Doug did, I also got a 250gb USB external drive. I also use 4gb USB thumb drives to store converted videos and DVDs, to watch via Windows Media Player on the PC. It provides plenty of good-enough video quality to watch a film on a flight or whatever, and the USB thumb drives use less power than the larger 250gb drive.

This mini PC will never replace a full-size computer, but armed with it and the shareware modem-conversion program for my spouse's PDA cell phone, (PDAnet from junefabrics.com) we have nearly broadband Internet access anywhere we can get a cell signal. It's perfect for looking up a restaurant in the car, surfing email and TUG while on the go, or while waiting in airports. It works very well for me, as long as I'm willing to accept the limitations.

Dave

Well, if you want less limitations, you get one with a decent size screen, decent size keyboard and a 160GB hard drive

Like the Asus 1000HE.

-David

The Asus says it weighs over 5lb. The new Dell 10" is 2.5lb? Is this right? We are looking ot buy one too for my mom and size is, well, important.

Katherine

SDKath said:

The Asus says it weighs over 5lb.

Click to expand...

Where did you see that? Amazon?

Amazon lists the shipping weight as 5.something pounds and says the notebook itself is 7 pounds. That's not correct. Nobody would buy a 5 pound netbook, let alone a 7 pound one. Well, that's not true, I'm sure somebody might, but I wouldn't. Maybe somebody that's already carrying 7+ pounds of netbook, ac adapter plus external hard drives might. hahaha.

http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=4832&review=asus+eee+pc+1000he

Weight: 3lbs 2.4oz, 3lbs 9.9oz travel

My XPS M1330 is a full featured 13.3" notebook that weighs less than 5 pounds. So if they can't keep the weight down, people will just move up in class. The entire idea of the netbook is small and light, so it's easier to travel with.

-David

Yes, I saw it on Amazon. Thanks for clarifying. Katherine

The notebooks you guys are comparing are apples and oranges. The Dell has a solid state hard drive which has no moving parts, just like the new Apples. IMO this is the wave of the future. Hard drives will be plugged in like an SD card. You won't have the need for "160-320gb" hard drive anymore. Base operating systems on the solid state drive, and everything else will be portable.

I would love an SSD. But they are super pricy so far and offer very little storage (32G max???). We need a few more years before that will be the best choice. K

They are much larger than 32G now, but the big ones (128G) are very expensive.

For example,

Mac Book Air with 120G hard drive is around $1700 - $1800
It's around $470 more with a 128G SSD.

-David

One thing to keep in mind regarding SSD's is that they're still in their infancy. They are not well suited for writing multiple times. Sure, they're faster and more rugged, but the write endurance of flash memory is not great and is getting worse all of the time due to multiple bit per cell architectures which are necessary to compete with disk drives. For applications like mass storage, where usage is primarily write once, read many, and data errors are acceptable (such as photos and music) this is likely not an issue. This may not be the case when using them in a high usage, data intensive environment. The good news is that when an SSD "goes bad" one will still be able to access the data for copying to a new drive.