Dell Mini 9 Review Running OSX 10.5.6
I recently bought a dell mini 9 from the Dell outlet store for 254.00. What did I get for that price, I got a refurbished dell min with a 16 gig ssd, 1 gig of ram and a 1.3 megapixel webcam. I have been looking for a ultra portable and cheap notebook that I could use anywhere and not have to worry about it so that left a Macbook out which was my first choice although bigger than I wanted. So I started looking at netbooks which Apple has yet to make so I had to look elsewhere like the MSI Wind , Dell Mini 9 and Aspire one which all run windows or linux. While having all macs at home and not having a windows machine since 2001, I really did not want to go back to using windows again. I found that the MSI WInd and DEll mini can run OSX pretty much out of the box the exception is the winds wireless card does not play well with osx and requires a separate program to be run to get it to work or a card replacement. I found the dell to be good 100% out of the box including webcam, wireless and sleep. So I choose the dell and found a great deal using a coupon from slickdeals.net which got me 20% off the refurbished price.
The Mini arrived in very good condition, you could not tell it was a refurbished unit except for the green sticker on the bottom. It loaded with xp and a full charge so I powered it up and I started playing around with it in xp and found it to be very responsive. Boot time and shut down time were very quick most likely due the ssd drive. The build quality seems very good and for such a tiny computer it has a great screen. But being a mac guy my time in windows did not last long so I began looking best forum for putting the OSX on the mini. What I found was Mydellmini forums. They have a great forum and how to section with all the software and drivers need to get OSX up and running. I will not go into detailed installation steps here since the forum covers all that. I will tell you putting OSX was no harder than installing it on a regular mac, only a couple extra steps are needed. It took me about an 1 hour to prepare two usb memory sticks and finish installation. After installing OSX and Office I had about 4.7 gig free on a 16 gig ssd. I then used Xslimmer to remove PPC files, I ended up with 5.9 gigs free and everything still works fine.
I upgraded the memory to 2 gigs still running with the factory 16 gig ssd and it runs very speed for being a tiny netbook. I have also installed Nikon Capture 2 and runs surprisingly well. Battery life is ok on the 4 cell battery, I get about 2:30 mins on a full charge . After using this netbook for a couple months running nothing but OSX I can tell you I have run in to no problems at all no kernel panics, freezes, or shutdowns. It is almost as this netbook was made by apple that is how well it works.
If you are looking for a cheap netbook and want to run OSX but worry about a difficult hackintosh install or worry about not having a fully functioning netbook. The Dell Mini 9 is for you everything just works just like a mac including sleep.
Here is the forum that will get mac osx up and running on your mini in no time.
http://mydellmini.com/forum
Comments (1)
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