Survival Skills Rider Training

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned my trials with the Acer Aspire One – a nice netbook but crippled by the poor choice of dumbed-down operating system, and a machine which unfortunately broke down after a couple of days use before I had chance to put Windows XP on it.

As soon as it was returned to the shop for a refund, I went online to Tesco Direct and ordered my second choice, the Dell Mini 9, which turned up for in-store collection next day.

Unwrapping the packaging, the first impressions are how shiny the black case is. It’s actually rather nice-looking, though I did like the blue colour I picked for the Acer. It’s still a fingerprint magnet though.

Anyway, opening the clamshell up and booting, there’s a fairly long winded procedure to click through as you go through the Dell EULA and agree to sign your life away. When that’s done, rebooting and you’re into Windows XP.

The first thing you notice is that the screen is very bright – for normal use indoors you can turn it right down – but highly reflective. It probably explains partly at least the crisp clarity of the display but doesn’t help viewing when there’s brighter light behind. Viewing angles are pretty good though, with it viewable through 90 degrees or more.

Setting up the wireless network was painless – once I’d configured my router correctly, that is – but did reveal one issue with the 600 pixel deep display; some of the configuration dialogue boxes drop off the bottom of the screen, so you can’t actually see the OK or Cancel buttons! The resolution is fixed at 1024 x 600, so there’s no easy way round this that I can see. One workaround is to plug in an external monitor, and after some research online I did find a reference to a bit of freeware that will force a resolution change on the graphics but I haven’t tried that.

[EDIT - there's a much easier workaround. You need to use the display settings to change the screen resolution to 1280x768. This will have the effect of making the desktop disappear below the bottom of the screen but moving the mouse to the bottom edge of the screen will scroll the desktop up - and voila! Your missing dialogue box buttons are revealed! Change back when you're finished installing!]

Getting online revealed the next issue; I discovered that some of my regular websites didn’t display right – some parts of the text on the pages were displaying at the wrong font size which made a mess of the layout.

I fiddled around with various font settings on several different browsers without success, and it wasn’t till I investigated the display settings under the “Settings” tab (advanced button), I found that the display DPI had been set to 120dpi, when the normal setting is 96dpi. Putting this back to the standard setting returned all font sizes to normal and restored the websites. If you have weird display issues with web pages, try this!

My next plan was to download some of the programs I like to have running, such as firewall and anti-virus. First thing installed was a file manager to deal with install programs and to see how much space was available. Ah… with an 8Gb solid state drive fitted, only 1Gb was free.

Now, I knew it was a small drive when I ordered the Dell (the 16Gb SSD was one of the reasons for going for the Acer in the first place) but 7Gb seemed a lot for a clean XP installation, so I looked to free up some space.

The first thing to go was Dell “bloatware”. There’s some kind of avatar creation software associated with the webcam which is completely unnecessary and was chucked in the recycle bin straight away, freeing up hundreds of Mbs. Also removed were the Norton trial and Adobe Reader (replaced with AVG and Foxit PDF reader). That freed up around another Gb, but more had to go. There’s an install of MS Works on it which I’ll never use, so that went too.

But there was still something taking up a lot of space, so I had a look at the system files! Aha… a huge page file and an hibernation file.

Turning off hibernation saved a further gigabyte (the size of the hibernation file is equal the the amount of RAM), and reducing the pagefile to 200Mb saved another 800Mb, without impacting the performance noticeably. Some users are turning the page file off altogether, but leaving 200Mb doesn’t seem too dramatic a space hit.

I could have gone further, and re-installed a stripped-down version of XP, which apparently only needs around 1Gb, but with everything working I’d got the installed files down to around 3Gb, so I decided to leave it at that as I now had around 3.5Gb of free space on the SSD. That still left some missing capacity, which I believe is taken up by a Dell tools hidden partition. Some people have deleted that but I gather it makes diagnostics difficult if you have a problem, so I left it.

As I’ve mentioned before, most of my “office” is based on Portable Apps that run off a USB stick, so I don’t need to install much in the way of software, but there’s a few things I like that won’t run in a portable mode, for example this blogging software I’m using right now is one, K-Meleon web browser seems happier installed, and a codec pack is needed to play my various training videos.

Where possible these “installed” programs have gone onto a 1Gb SD card, though I’ve made sure the file manager and graphics software are on the internal SSD so I can use the card slot for the camera SD card where necessary. I could go up to an 8Gb card for under a tenner, and that would give me enough install space to for just about anything I’m likely to need, but for the moment I’ll live with the smaller card. Even so, I still have 3Gb of free space on the SSD now. [Edit - I got a 4Gb card for £7 and that's more than enough for my mobile office software and working files - together they normally live on a 256Mb USB stick .]

OK, so with the software installed, how usable is such a small machine in the real world?

Well I’ve already mentioned the small screen depth. This means a few compromises in use. One of the first things I’ve done is to shrink desktop icons and display text to the minimum, and to shuffle them up closer together. I’ve also set the task bar to auto hide, which gives a little more screen real estate.

With programs, it makes sense to turn off unnecessary toolbars, use small icons and disable text on the icon bars, and to rearrange the ones left to maximise usable space. Some programs allow the status bar to be turned off too, which might be useful for some.

With the web browser, installing a compact skin also helps, as would using the F11 “full screen” display…

…which presented a keyboard problem! There is no F11 key!

To keep the keyboard compact (and allow the battery to be a full height, chunky thing), Dell have removed the row of function keys that normally sits above the number keys and instead have given you F1-F10 on the ASDF row, activated by the function key on the bottom row that also gives access to volume, screen brightness and so on.

Some reviewers seem to loath that decision, in practice I didn’t find it an issue as there are only a few programs within which I use function keys.

But the missing F11 key was a bit of a frustration, until I discovered on a useful internet forum that it’s actually the function key + Z combo and that F12 is the X! For some reason it’s not marked on the keyboard. So welcome back full screen browsing!

The keyboard itself isn’t too bad with a reasonably crisp action. It’s not perfect, definitely not as easy to type on as my old Sharp subnote, mostly because some of the non-QWERTY keys are half-width, which leads to the odd mishit key. The offset on the top row of keys isn’t quite the same as the bottom row either which is a little odd-feeling, although it’s a distinct improvement on the first iteration of the Mini 9 which had the top row directly above the middle row keys – apparently that was very difficult to touch type on.

The track pad is nice and responsive but rather let down by two spongy buttons below it. They work but are soggy – they feel like the spring has partly broken. Still, it’s perfectly workable, they just feel very different from the keys.

All the usual connectors are in place, with three USB sockets, ethernet, external monitor, and external speakers and microphone to go with the webcam and mic in the lid. Other options not fitted on my Tesco Direct sourced netbook include bluetooth and 3G connectivity. For enquiring minds, the SIM slot for the latter is behind the battery but don’t try sticking a SIM in just to see if it works – there’s no socket in the slot!

Upgrading the RAM and the SSD is relatively easy, with a large, two screw hatch covering much of the base of the machine and removing it doesn’t invalidate the warranty.

I’ve not fully tested out battery life but it’s quoted as over three hours and certainly it’s capable of running a couple of hours without problems.

Issues?

Certainly, the pretty standard processor / graphics / RAM netbook package is never going to match an up-to-the-minute desktop or full on laptop for processing power, but that’s not the point. The Dell Mini 9 is quite capable of running most day-to-day software – web browsing, word processing and web editing, basic photo editing and playing music and video clips.

There’s no fan and it does get hot – with the processor doing a bit of work playing video or similar, the base of the machine does get distinctly warm. For some reason, there’s no charging light, just a low battery warning LED on the edge of the case. Slightly worrying are numerous reports of the SSD failing and being replaced under warranty, something to keep an eye on.

If you just want a web browser / email solution and aren’t interested in installing your own software, it’s a job that the Acer Aspire One will do, but love it or hate it, for the average user WinXP on a netbook offers a portable, flexible and very useable working environment that the stripped down Linux machines simply can’t match out of the box.

The painless install procedure of the vast majority of Windows programs knocks the stuffing out of the Linux command line for the average user too. Certainly I could learn more Linux, but do I want to when I have work to do?

As is the way of these things, the Dell Mini 9 has already been superceded by the Vostro A90, though it appears it’s a simply rebadged Mini 9 with a price hike. [Edit - Blimey! The Vostro A90 must be a candidate for the shortest model run ever; both the Mini 9 and the Vostro were discontinued at the beginning of June! ]

At the date of writing, the Mini 9 (minus Bluetooth and 3G) is still available at Tesco Direct for £229.00 at the moment, which is a big saving on the PC World price for the Vodaphone-connected version.