Monday, September 21, 2009

Another Dell Mini in the family

When Aidan saw the Mini 9 I bought, he was immediately jealous. So, we got him one for his birthday. Bought this one at the Dell Outlet, just like mine. In this case, I bought him the Vostro A90, which is a Vostro branded Mini 9. Only difference is that the black A90 is all black, where mine is silver below the keyboard.

Since I was planning on eventually loading mac OS X on mine, I didnt want to purchase another copy of XP. It adds about $50 to the cost. Rather than getting the Mini 9 with an 8GB SSD XP, I got him a Vostro A90 with a 16GB SSD, Bluetooth and the webcam for $10 less than the Mini 9. I figured we would use my XP license after I loaded OS X.

We fired up his Vostro and got to see Ubuntu. Visually, it just looks better than XP on the Mini 9. They have really done a nice implementation. The only problem that we had was the wireless was unable to properly negotiate a connection with my new 2Wire AT&T router. I had to explicitly set the 2Wire to PKA2, then everything worked.

Turns out now that Aidan wants Mac OS X on his Vostro. He is more familiar with my iMac than Kerry's Dell. Looks like I'll be doing the install sometime this week. I have a 16GB SSD and 2 GB memory upgrade on order for mine.