Below Belief

So I managed the upgrades ok (I used Clonezilla in the end to copy across the XP installation).

Now my plan is to buy a retail upgrade disk of Snow Leopard and follow the various instructions here: to get it onto the mini.

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!

It was £150 and it’s a tiny Dell netbook – very light, good (3 hour) battery life and a decent screen. It’s a bit of a toy really and I expect to use it when travelling (and the laptop is too big to take), for downloading photos on the go, for blogging, for browsing the net around the house.

I’m toying with putting Ubuntu (Linux) or maybe even Hackintosh on it – more as an experimental platform really.

I’ll let you know how I get on.

Things I like so far: very light, and very fast to start up (not much on it – I’m expecting that it’ll be even faster with one of the other OSs on it). The screen is also nice and bright and just about big enough for web browsing.

The keyboard is very small – like embarrassing when you start typing… takes a bit of getting used to. But I’m typing this now and not having too many problems, I’d say 70% as good as a normal size laptop. I made a few tweaks already to make it better:

First was a good clean with windowlene on the screen and keyboard…

The first problem I had today was the space bar wasn’t working properly -so I prised it off with a screwdriver, cleaned underneath and snapped the key back on – now it’s working nicely. It was only working when you pressed the center – not either end – and I typically use both when typing.

The other problem was that the Delete key is right next to the left arrow key and they’re small… so I used www.keytweak.com to swap the delete key with the Alt Rt key next to it – and then the instructions here: http://www.machinaelectronics.com/store/library/article.cfm?f=key_type_k06 to actually swap the physical key caps on those keys. Much better.

Now I keep hitting return when I mean to hit apostrophe – for some reason that key is even smaller than normal… not sure what to do about that yet!

Will update if I do more cool stuff.