Below Belief

I wanted to make the Dell Mini 9 a bit more powerful, so I plan a couple of things:

(1) Replace the standard 1Gb RAM with 2Gb RAM – this is pretty cheap (you can do 4Gb but it’s much more expensive).

So I bought a cheap SODIMM RAM chip, followed the video here:  and my Dell Mini now has 2Gb RAM.

(2) Replace the standard 8Gb SSD (solid state drive) with a bigger 32 Gb one – this is mainly because to make it useful as a device to store photos etc on the run or to store a decent amount of music, you need more than the poxy 3Gb that is left on the 8Gb drive once you’ve installed XP (or whatever else)…

So I bought a Super Talent 32 Gb SSD and I plan to follow the instructions here: http://dellmini.wordpress.com/2009/01/26/cloning-your-disk-drive/ to upgrade it. It’s a bit of a pain since I don’t have the original installation disks for XP or the Dell Recovery disk – so I’m going to have to clone the drive I have (the dell mini can only have one SSD at a time), store a copy, swap the drives out, boot onto a USB device, restore the cloned copy onto the bigger disk and then fingers crossed it all comes up cleanly.

If it works, it’ll be a great start as if I then subsequently attempt a Hackintosh installation, I’ll be able to fall back on the restore if everything goes wrong.

Will keep you posted!