Dell Inspiron Mini 9 – a cursory glance.
After spending weeks looking for a laptop to use at home for under $400, I finally gave up and ordered a Cherry Red, Dell Inspiron Mini 9 from SamsClub.com. For $254.00 delivered, I got a 9″ netbook with a dual-core 1.6ghz Atom processor, 1 gb of RAM, and 8 gb of Solid State Disk (SSD) that it uses as a hard drive. It also came preloaded with Windows XP Home SP3, which — for a Microsoft product — is still the best Windows out there for the casual user like me. I — for the record — loathe Vista with every fiber of my being, as reinforced by my recent experiment with a Dell Studio 540.
Anyway, for a 9″ screened computer which weighs in at around 2.5 pounds, this thing is pretty snappy, pretty cool, and actually usable. The keyboard, as I’m sure you can imagine, is a bit on the small side for my pudgy fingers, but it’s certainly faster/better than trying to legitimately surf on my iPhone.
So, with the plethora of netbooks out there, why did I choose the Dell Inpiration Mini 9? There were certainly larger (10″), faster notebooks out there with real 160gb hard drives, but for me, it boiled down to two things:
- Price — No one seemed to be able to get near the $245 price tag, unless you counted the president’s day sale direct from Dell, but that one had Ubuntu on it which — in this case — doesn’t really matter when my hopes are finalized (more on that shortly).
- Expandability — Unlike the more popular Acer, EeePC or other netbooks (that I could find), the Dell actually encourages expansion by putting a big door on the bottom of the machine which allows easy access to add more memory, bigger SSD storage, bluetooth card, and even a WWAN (3G) card if you’d like. I already ordered a 2gb RAM stick and 32gb SSD from crucial.com and will probably order 2 more in order to be able to easily jump between operating systems such as Ubuntu, XP, and even maybe, just maybe MacOS X if I get REALLY curious.
As of Tuesday, I’m going on my first road trip with it to DC and will update the blog later with a full “seriously, how usable is a netbook in the real world?” post when I get back (or maybe from the road if I get really, really bored.
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Category: Technology
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Haha, mann have i got a question for you! I ordered the same laptop from samsclub.com (given its only been about 9 days) and I was wondering how long it took you to get it. It wasnt my membership, and i charged it to my boyfriends credit card (with his permission of course) and they made him verify it was okay to charge it, and then when i called and asked the status on it the phone rep said i would have a tracking number this past monday. Then I get an email saying the credit card holder has to call by the 23rd or they will cancel the order because someone that was not him called about the order. even though I verified all the info they wanted! lol So nowI cant call and find out, I dont want him to (In case they find another reason to cancel it) and the damn offer isnt even on their website!! Is the computer even worth the trouble??
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I’m sure that — even without the advertisement on samsclub.com — if you have your boyfriend, the owner of the card, call them, he can straighten it all out without much problem.
At least I’d hope that’s what would happen.
As for delivery time, 3 weeks exactly from the date of purchase. I didn’t get an e-mail, and when I called them a couple of times, got completely different answers including “it’ll ship out Friday”.
When their Web site didn’t change by next Monday, I called them again and got “we don’t know who would have ever told you that”.
The next day, it showed up, shipped directly from Dell outside of Nashville, TN.
The funny thing was, a week later, I get this e-mail saying that it was ‘ready to ship’ and to expect a tracking number soon.
Short answer, three weeks. You should know however that Dell has stopped making the Dell mini 9 in favor of the Dell Mini 10. This is why sam’s took it off their site but they should honor already-placed orders.
Would it be worth it to wait? Depends on what he wants it for. The thing about the Dell Mini 10 is that it’s a much higher price for a slower machine, so in essence, Yeah. I like it better than what replaced it.
Wayne
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