Having been amongst the first to purchase the Dell 910 Mini I wanted to share my experience with others that might be thinking about acquiring this item or one of the other sub-notebook or ‘netbooks’ as they have become known. I manage a web design agency and I’ve been contemplating the idea of acquiring myself a more modern laptop as my old Dell Inspiron from 2003 is as heavy as a brick.
Shortly after having retired the old Dell to my girlfriends house (I couldn’t face lugging it back and forwards any longer so it just lives there now, I might well do the same with myself one of these days soon!) it stopped charging and wouldn’t run from the mains, so eventually when I gave it to my tech to repair he found out that it was one of the known faulty models, the 5150 which developed a problem with the motherboard overheating after prolonged use, this I found out about 2 years after they stopped replacing them as part of a class action lawsuit, shame I’m two years too late to get it replaced for free!
Ah well what’s 150 quid for a factory refurbished Motherboard off ebay, compared with years of loyal service in spite of being dropped a couple of times, spat on repeatedly, eaten over and all manner of other not recommended usage styles! I even used to have it hooked up to my TV via the onboard S-VHS port and watch films on it, so it has seen some action, oh yes!Not that I download movies off the internet you understand of course, oh no that would just be wrong, and illegal and I wouldn’t want to risk getting my broadband disconnected!
However, this was all instigated by my step dad who just took delivery of top of the range Toshiba Portege at around £1,200, but he’s at that time in life where 1,200 quid is affordable, where as I’m still in financial recovery from my last divorce (yes there was more than one!)! So I happened across an ad for the Dell Inspiron 910 Mini on the Dell website whilst looking at specs of notebooks for a client, and there it was £299 inc VAT and delivery. What a bargain I thought!
Anyway there I was flexible friend on hot standby, wrist twitching ready to make a purchase, but wait a minute I thought, why am I buying this, do I really need it? No, I don’t NEED it I just WANT ONE ! So then some sensibility came over me and I put my credit card away, feeling all pleased with myself at having managed to resist an impulse purchase!
However, the next day my step Father needs me to investigate his new machine because he can’t get the music software to work and can’t get it to see the other computers that are on our network(this job for me, comes with the territory! ) So I have to genuinely work on this ultra lightweight new laptop, wow I’m amazed at how small it is, especially when compared with my old Dell 5150! I wish I had cash spare to invest in one of these I thought! I noticed he didn’t have my preferred security software set up though. To have internet security experts use Avast Anti Virus and Spybot Search& Destroy, which as well as being zero cost, are just great applications.
The next day I had to go to a client’s and as the appointement was first thing in the morning I went straight from my girlfriends house and took the old laptop with me (which gives me a great excuse to call in on my way back and drop it off, coincidentally around about lunchtime when there might be the chance of a ham, cheese and salad sandwich on the go! Yum, she is soooo good to me!) So anyway, I about put my back out trying to put this incredibly heavy laptop in the car passenger foot well whilst sitting in the drivers’ seat! One of those ‘put your back out’ manoeuvres. So having experienced the new lightweight machines first hand, and realised I do have a genuine NEED for the new Dell Inspiron mini after all, weighing in at around 1kg, you know I planned to get that credit card out again as soon as I was able!
So as I had a management meeting that afternoon I informed my Finance Manager I would be ordering one and that was that. It was Friday October 3rd when I placed the order on the Dell website, and on the 8th I got back from a client meeting to find a small cardboard box on my desk with the Dell log on the side, I thought it couldn’t possibly be the new mini as the confirmation email I got said it would arrive on or around the 20th October, but sure enough it really had arrived!
So I’m like a kid in a sweet shop thinking “best day ever” (See Heroes Season 3), I was ecstatic and carefully unpacked it, tossing instructions and disks to one side, “read those later” I thought. I got it out and started setting it up straight away, you know remove McAfee Security Centre and all the other junk software these things come with these days.
As it has an integrated web cam I also downloaded Windows Live Messenger and had a short video call with my missus whilst she was doing her house work, fantastic! What a great bit of kit!So next I Googled ‘mobile broadband suppliers’ and toyed with ordering the USB dongle from Three, as their 5GB monthly allowance is only 15 quid a month so the best looking deal, providing those coverage stories you hear about Three Mobile are not really true! (Update: Yes the coverage is lousy in all the areas I want to use it, even at my desk I have to connect the dongle to a USB cable and hang it from my roof to get 1 bar signal strength, ridiculous buy another brand!) Current suggestion is for an O2 dongle as they have good coverage and a good backbone speed.
Anyway, it was soon time to go and pick up my daughter from school so I thought yeah I’ll take it with me and even though I don’t have the mobile broadband dongle yet I can continue configuring it in car park if I’m early. I was early, so I turned it on, it said:
Windows could not start because of an error in the software.
Please report this problem as :
load needed DLLs for kernel.
Please contact your support person to report this problem
As we say in England from the popular Catherine Tate sketch “Computer says no…”
Ah dear, it was great fun whilst it lasted, all of about 2 and a half minutes!Then followed a two and a half hour telethon with Dell support in India 
Apparently they were so quick to ship the laptop to me that my service tag isn’t on their system yet. Service Tag? What does that have to do with it not booting up?
In my opinion good support is simple, it’s not like we’re dealing with complicated server virtualisation here. It’s a Dell 910 mini laptop, which has an error on the screen when you try to start it up, every time, send a replacement! “We don’t’ know what the service tag is so we can’t do that”, I was absolutely livid. In spite of insisting to speak to the supervisor, I got absolutely nowhere, and they probably thought they had handled that call in the appropriate manner!)
They suggested I called back in 24-48 hours, well I told them exactly what I thought of their suggestion as I’m sure you can image, but to no avail. I did indeed have to call back today and they have agreed to send me a replacement unit as it is within 7 days of delivery.
I hope the replacement arrives as promptly as the original unit did…
So conclusion? Apart from the fact it doesn’t work (a faulty drive in my opinion) and for the life of me I can’t get it to boot from an external drive or USB key (it doesn’t have a CD or DVD drive you know) it feels really solid, looks lovely, and is nice to handle (sounds a bit like the ideal partner to an i-phone 2.0 doesn’t it!).
Like most reviewers have experienced, the keys are small (but blackberry users manage and they are larger than those keys) and the right shift key is tiny and means you can’t type an @ in the usual fashion. But the screen is nice, 3 USB slots, a monitor connector, Ethernet and earphones and mic connectors although it has both speakers and mic internally so you can video conference without having to plug anything in.
On the whole, I would recommend it, providing you get one that works ! I am also yet to try it with LogMeIn which is my preferred way of dealing with how to access emails, lots of passwords, specialist software and all that kind of thing when you are out and about. Possibly the screen is going to be too small to be able to work with for extended periods of time, but I’ll let you know when the replacement arrives and I have had chance to give it a proper testing, assuming that one doesn’t break on me as soon as I start urm ‘configuring’ it!
Further Update: So I have had the Dell Mini for about erm, wow nearly a year now! It would never work with LogMeIn over the Three dongle. To be fair Three were very helpful, until we took the dongle out and used it in another one of my computers and were able to connect on LogMeIn without any problems, at this point they referred me to Dell, at which point I lost the will to live!
It is all to do with one of the browser settings, not remembering itself when you select the check box and hit OK. I can’t remember which one it was now, and maybe ie 8 will have fixed the problem or it might work on Firefox browser instead, I just never got round to trying to sort it out again and tend to use the Mini more now to read the news in bed with my cup of tea in the morning.It’s just so convenient being so small, and another great feature is it’s near instant turn on. If you just shut the lid it goes into standby, open the lid and it comes back on again within seconds.
It is too small to use for really extended periods but it is great for checking your email when you’re out and about, or for a quick impulse surf when you can’t be bothered to turn the main pc on and you want to remind yourself what other films that actor or actress was in for example!Someone with one of those massive lcd monitors could get great use out of one of these minis by using it to drive a large screen.
It’s a cracking little machine though and also works quite well down the pub, because I can fit it in the pocket of my big coat, and that is proper cool, except it doesn’t like beer puddles much so I tend to avoid taking it most of the time, unless I know I’m going to need to log on, but then the pub has got a sexy new Mac which is already covered in beer so I prefer to use that (any excuse to get behind the bar really!)What is so magical about being able to go behind the bar at your local anyway? I suspect if I actually worked there it would soon wear off!
In summary though it has not had any hardware reliability issues since the initial replacement was received. On the whole I have found that Dell kit tends to be pretty reliable anyway, especially when you are dealing with the more business based items whereas this is obviously more consumer oriented. With a Dell if they are going to go wrong they will usually do so within the first 6 months of use and generally after that they will keep going until recommended service intervals such as changing the disks after a couple of years and that kind of thing.
It should be made clear though that these mini Dell laptops/netbooks, call them what you will, do not having a traditional hard disk drive inside them. A normal hard drive has a disk inside it that physically spins round and a ‘head’ which moves backwards and forwards over the sectors quite like the relationship between the stylus and the tracks on an old fashion vinyl record(which being 40 next year I do remember from my childhood)!
The hard drives within the Dell mini, and other netbooks too I should image, are solid state, that is to say they are rather like USB flash drives or memory keys. In fact I think from a picture I saw they look more like RAM memory chips all joined together than a single physical device. The advantage of using solid state memory over traditional hard drives is that they use less power, they are not as heavy and they are quieter. Much quieter. If you’re like me you will have noticed how computers have got a lot noisier over the last 10 years, as they have got more powerful.
My machine is blissfully quiet in comparison to any of my other computers, desktops or laptops. Although if you are super-sensitive to noise like I am then you can notice a very slight hum or whine when you give it something to do that requires it to access the hard drive. Most people probably will never hear this but if you are familiar with the faint hum from your mobile phone charger or other devices of that ilk that transform power from one state to another then you might know what I am talking about. It certainly isn’t a problem though, although the power adapter for the machine itself does make some odd noises if you listen to it closely. It is similar to a mobile phone charger though, not like a traditional laptop power adapter, and this makes the whole thing much more portable.
My favourite aspect of this machine is that in some it elicits the same response as having a small puppy or kitten out and about with you, especially down the pub where if you get it out to a bunch of girls you can hear the ooh and ahhh’s of girls who think something is cute! That is priceless!
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