Mid April comes and the tax return that was filed electronically in early January finally arrives. After getting some bills caught up and ahead, it is decided to take the plunge. I go to Sam's Club and purchase an off the shelf Dell Mini 9.
I get it home and order a 32GB Super Talent SSD and Kensington 2GB SODIMM RAM upgrade from Newegg.com for $111.49 delivered. Impatient to try the OS X installation, I try everything I can to get it to fit on the STEC 8GB SSD that came with the standard Windows XP installation. Alas, to no avail can I strip enough away from the retail DVD to get it down to size to fit in the space available on the GUID partition. That was fine because it would have been very frustrating to not have even been able to update OS X so that it could have booted without the Type11 USB thumb drive still attached.
When that failed, I reinstalled Windows XP, from the CDs that came in the box with the Mini 9 and the result for was a little surprising. The self-installed version of Windows XP actually outperformed the pre-customized one that came pre-installed. So, if you are a Windows only Dell Mini user and reading this page, you might consider starting from a blank drive with the discs that came with your computer. Anyway, I decided to keep the original 8GB SSD with a pre-configured Windows XP installation on it so that if I ever had to use that inherently flawed platform, out of sheer desperation, I could just quickly swap out the SSD drives and reboot.
Two days later my components arrived from Newegg.com. I was working for the Census Bureau doing door to door address canvassing. I had stopped by my house for lunch and quickly installed the two components. I took my Dell Mini 9 with me and started it installing at my first stop. I was at an apartment complex and the manager was not in so I had a little time to kill while I waited for her to return.
It took just 28 minutes to install, faster than it ever installed on my desktop Mini with an Intel CoreDuo processor. I rebooted in safe mode and installed the 10.5.6 upgrade. Then I installed DellEFI 1.2.a5 and restarted the Mini 9. Bingo, success we had the grey Apple startup screen with the black Apple logo with the spinning status graph below it. OS X was up and running and all components were all running just as they would on a MacBook Air.
I then install iLife 09 and iWork 09. Other than having to open Terminal to execute a Unix command to adjust the display scale to 75% so that I could launch each or the iLife and iWork titles and get pass their first run screens, every title runs perfectly. Aperture also installed and runs perfectly. FileMaker Pro installs and runs perfectly. As does the SDK for the iPhone. The same for Microsoft Office 2008. Quicken runs great with one exception: you cannot click checkboxes in the dialogue boxes that pop up with certain functions. I run Software Update and everything comes off without a hitch. I downloaded Microsoft Silverlight and am able to watch instantly viewable movies from Netflix, which I wasn't able to do on the Windows XP SP3 installation that came pre-installed on the 8GB Stec SSD.
OS X is running great and it believes the Dell Mini 9 is an original MacBook Air.
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