Dell Mini 9 with Mac-OSX
About a month ago, I happen to run into Lawrence from Computer Solutions as he was walking back from dinner. He was carrying a very small looking net-book with an Apple label so I asked him about it. He was all but glad to show off his new “Dell Mini 9 with Mac OSX” It seems its been his hobby for awhile now to try and load Apple’s OSX operating system onto a non-Mac product, and he had done so successfully with a lot of work in the past year but the Dell Mini 9 was the first one he felt was truly compatible and was straightforward to load. AND, on top of that, the compatibility for accessories seemed to all be there. And so I was intrigued, and 2 weeks later, decided that I had to try one out.
A few weeks later, Lawrence and his staff hooked me up with on, preloaded with the software I needed so I could test it out in real life, not just a quick look like the first time. My first impressions were that upon powering on, OSX loaded pretty quickly and that this computer was faster than my older G4powerbook. Which is true since this Atom based unit is pretty darned quick. My second impression though was that the keyboard was SO small. A week later, I still have typo issues with this unit, even as I type this up on a 767 enroute back to Shanghai.
But the convenience of carrying this computer and its decent 3 hour charge for use is not bad at all. And even worth the initial getting used to of this keyboard.
UPDATE:
After another week of use, the fingers are getting used to this keyboard. Though the stray track pad touch still throws me occasionally, I am finding for light use days, it is certainly a refreshing change to only bring a small 2 pound unit half the size of my Powerbook.
I would say though that if one has large or fat fingers? Forget it…this keypad like most 9” mini net-books really IS small.
Found a few quirks in the system though as I have now been using this for over a week. Mostly small things, like:
1) The track pad cannot be turned off when a mouse is present. Have not tried powering on with a mouse so maybe its just not able to recognize when I hot-connect while the unit is on.
2) The sleep mode still has issues occasionally and will not wake from sleep
3) In MS Word, when both the mouse and trackpad are present, the cursor arrow remains on the side of the page while the text cursor continues onto the page.
Like mentioned before though, nothing catastrophic, just minor annoyances and quirks. Will keep reporting if anything else comes up. ☺
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