The Apple of My Eye
09.22.08 - 04:46pm
Is not an Apple! Who’d a thunk it, here I am no longer lusting after a Macbook Air but something entirely different yet the same. After taking a look at my financial state(read: broke), the amount of donations I received from the Laptop Fund($45!), and my estimated income over the next 3 months, I’ve decided to aim a bit lower. Move out of the way overpriced Macbook Air and make room for the Dell Inspiron Mini 9!
Dude.. a Dell?
I’m not going to lie, the thought of me owning a Dell laptop kind of gives me the creeps. Dell makes fantastic monitors(using one right now) but I’d never touch their desktops. When I look at their laptops I feel like I’m just settling rather than striving for the best. Thankfully the Inspiron Mini 9 slips right into the ultra-portable category where I am able to look past it’s weak processor, paltry storage options, and lack of a DVD drive in exchange for some serious battery life and portability.
The Plan
What’s a post without a plan? Right now I intend on maintaining a powerful desktop computer to do all the heavy lifting so I just need this Mini 9 to be cute and portable. To help with battery life I’d like to either find software to adjust the frequencies and voltages. To help with storage I’d like to cram one of the 32GB or 64GB SSDs into the laptop, I won’t know if the current SSD is a 1.8″ or 2.5″ SSD with a PATA or SATA port until I have it in my hands or someone rips a Mini 9 apart. I’d like to load my old OS X install onto the laptop but I suspect a stripped Windows XP Professional SP3 would make more sense.
Timeline
I’m currently in the process of selling ALL of my LGA775 equipment in anticipation of Intel’s LGA1366 launch in November so once my QX9650 sells then I’ll buy the Mini 9. I look forward to playing around with this little laptop and hope it doesn’t disappoint. Have any suggestions or advice? Drop a comment, I’d like to hear about what I’m getting myself into. Now time to utilize those two Skribit suggestions!
Why not just go Ubuntu. If you are really just going to use it for web stuff and on-the-go, you can more than “cope” with linux. It’s a great OS and you’d increase your linux foo. They can ship it with Ubuntu too..
I need iTunes to work so I can stream media from my server/desktop to this portable. Maybe I can find a way to get iTunes or something using the iTunes protocols to work on Linux. I don’t fancy having to do an FTP transfer for every MP4 I want to watch on my server.
anywhere.fm
If you used Linux couldn’t you just share the folder over the network and then load the files in the media player of your choice?