As I predicated in my previous post about netbooks, I got myself a netbook of the Dell Mini9 variety. The reason I chose the Dell one was because it was small (8.9″ screen), and cheap ($279 for the base model). I did pay a bit more to upgrade to a 8GB SSD and to add a webcam. Plus I have to do an aftermarket upgrade from 512MB to 2GB of RAM.

After waiting almost two weeks for delivery (I ordered it the day I booked my nyc flights), it finally arrived. Another cost savings was that it came preloaded with Ubuntu rather than Windows. But I very much would rather use XP for convenience. The first thing I did was attempt to install XP.

Even having researched and prepared everything, it still took me 3 whole evenings to get XP installed. The problem is that there’s no CD drive on the mini, and I don’t have an external CD drive lying around. So, I had to boot and install off a USB key. The second hitch was that the XP setup typically is from a CD (especially the TinyXP version I was trying to install) and the boot sectors aren’t compatible.

I eventually got it, but in the process downloaded a ton of boot images and LiveUSBs. I couldn’t get TinyXP installed but settled for a nLite<'/a>d version of XP. Now that everything is installed, the mini is pretty usable (I’m writing this on it now), it’s far from perfect though.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: complaining, microsoft, mini9, techlust