Dell Mini 9 with OS X
My Dell mini has survived the road test at work. I have used it almost exclusively for about 2 weeks straight. I only had to fire up my MBP to open some proposals in Word (did not want to install MS Office on my mini). I am so impressed this $300 machine can satisfy my work requirement. Mind you I am a coder so, my requirements are pretty low.
For a short time, I worked with the stock version of Ubuntu installed when I opened the box. I was impressed with the speed of the machine early on. I guess I expected it to be sluggish at times and I am pleasantly surprised it has not been at all. The only disappointment I had that was the deal breaker was the lack of dual-monitor support. I quickly learned I could not plug my 22″ Dell monitor and run the native 1680 x 1050 resolution on the second monitor.
I found some articles for installing OS X on the machine and thought I’d give it a try. After purchasing a retail copy of OS X, I followed the instructions and within an hour had a functioning $300 Mac. I had a few hiccups, but overall it went very smooth. I installed my needed programs like Firefox, Chrome, BBEdit and an FTP client — and was up and running! I purchased the computer with a 16GB SSD drive so after the install I had about 5GB left. Obviously I will not be putting my music collection on this computer or storing tons of files, which is good. It will force me to maintain a lean installation and store all other files on the network. Besides I mostly listed to Last.fm or Pandora while at work.
I think it’s a keeper! Now I can leave my MBP at home.