Dell Inspiron Mini 9
Well... I thought I'd put this in a post separate from my college post. Remember when I said you can buy computers cheaper than the amount my school books cost? I wasn't lying. Okay. Here's the deal. My Dell Inspiron 9300 was bought to be a portable desktop. I had no wish to treat it as a laptop. It would remain plugged in at all times and be a small desktop for all intents and purposes. It works really well as a smaller desktop, too, I might add. (Except for the failing LCD which is beginning to show lines of primary colors.) The laptop's battery never lasted more than an hour, even on low power settings. It was just a fact of the 9300s.
Today, I took my laptop to school. It's a mammoth 19" hunk of widescreen goodness. AND HEAVY. No way I'm carrying it around everywhere. I'll take notes by hand if I have to. (And I did have to.) During lunch, I stopped by BroBro's truck which I borrowed because it's snowing here and it has four-wheel drive, and whipped out the lappy. I had password protected the hard drive so nobody was going to get into it if I left it to go get food. Lock Windows when I leave and if someone tries to reset it to get past the password, it presents another password that actually locks the hard drive even if you put it in another computer. Good stuff. I got on IMs using Meebo... I turned on XFire to talk to BroBro. 10 minutes later? Windows screams at me about critical battery levels and then almost instantly goes into standby mode. Yeah. A full charge lasted me only 10 minutes. Great.
This is during lunch in the Student Center. Plenty of power outlets, right? HAHAHAHA!! Everyone and their grandma was out using their laptops plugged into every outlet you could find. No more GS using his laptop. So I went back to the truck, tossed it all inside and listened to a bit of Rush Limbaugh instead. So much for using my laptop for ANYTHING at school. I checked all the classes for outlets and I found nothing... Ever. Brilliant.
Then I remembered a computer my friend Capella bought recently. A new thing Dell put out... Apparently, miniature laptops (yes, smaller than laptops) are starting to make appearances now. Tentatively called Netbooks. They don't play games and they don't have a huge amount of RAM or drive space. They don't have CD or DVD drives or much of anything, actually. It's just a keyboard, a monitor, a touchpad mouse, and networking hardware running Ubuntu Linux (or Windows XP or Windows Vista if you get the larger models). It is, however, enough drive space for things like checking email, reading sites, getting on IMs and... Dare I say? Taking class notes? It all comes preinstalled with just about every utility you'd need to do that sort of stuff. The best part?
The smallest model is 9 inches wide, 7 inches deep and 1 inch high. This thing is TINY. Small enough to, say... Fit in the book bag of a certain new university student? Did I mention it sports 4 hours of battery life under normal usage? More if you dim the screen and disable things like wireless. A couple classes don't allow laptops, and one doesn't allow network use. I think 4 hours could be plenty of juice for a day at college, aye? If not, I also plan to get one of those handy little "turn the car lighter into an outlet" dealies so I can charge it right there in the truck if I need to. (Probably during lunch hours.)
Yes, I did get one... It was $279 on Dell. Of course, it's not quite new... But it's not quite refurbished. It's Previously Ordered New. Which, if I recall correctly from what Capella told me, is simply a customized order that was sent back unused for some reason and Dell can't officially sell it new anymore. So it's someone's order, but they sent it back and it's still new, just used... But not really. I got one with an 8GB SSD and 1GB RAM. I was going to go for the cheaper 4GB SSD and 512MB RAM model and expand the drive size, but... Well, while it does have an SD card reader, 4GB SD cards will be slower and cost about $12 at Walmart. Cheap, yes. But it was only $10 more to upgrade the hard drive to 8GB and forget the expansion. I was going to go with 512MB, but it was only another $10 to double the amount of RAM to the limit. From a cost perspective, it wasn't worth saving $20 and going with half of the size and power. From $259 to $279? I think I can work an extra couple of hours to cover that difference. I'll just consider it part of my school cost... Like I said, my books cost more than that.
After I bought it, I realized what I did... I had accidentally fulfilled another need of mine. Well, sort of a need. One of those want/need things. Anyway, for months now, I've wanted something I could tote around and read ebooks on. Or, heck, even to write NaNoWriMo on in obscure places. Like on the roof. I had briefly tossed around the idea of getting a small Apple laptop, but the cost was always far too high for me to justify the features. Small, yes, but not much else. I mean, it wasn't small enough to go "wow, it's so small, I'll pay that much easily!" I'd settled on the idea that I would eventually buy an Amazon Kindle (which I may still do, but is now on hold) for reading digital books. Baen Books, the fantasy/sci-fi publisher, encourages authors to release books for free in ebook form to encourage sales. I love that idea... In fact, if I ever publish a book, I'm approaching them first. But the books are all in digital form... Web pages, mostly. Some are in special files for ebook reader programs. I wanted to read them like a real novel: In my bed without sitting up at the computer the whole time. So the Kindle was the obvious solution. But that kind of dashed the idea of a portable NaNoWriMo station.
I guess you can see where I'm headed... The Mini 9 is the perfect thing for taking notes at college (being smaller than a paper notebook) AND reading digital books AND writing in obscure places! I killed three birds with one stone. For less than my college books cost and for less than a Kindle cost and with a heck of a lot more options. It's a full computer, my friends. AND I HAVE ONE! It'll be here this weekend, though I fear it will arrive while I'm gone to classes on Friday. I would much prefer it to arrive tomorrow, and it may, since they made me pay sales tax which only happens online when the processing takes place in your state. So this ought to be interesting... Very interesting, indeed. I can't wait! Thanks to Capella for keeping an eye on the "tiny computer" market and showing me this a while ago. Barring anything unexpected, this could be one of my most useful purchases.
And now I sleep before I torture my body with an uptime of longer than 16 hours.