Dell Inspiron Mini 10

I’ve had the Dell Inspiron Mini 10 for just over a month now, and it has both met and at the same time completely failed my expectations. Let me explain…

I bought the Mini as a cheap backup in preparation for the impending catastrophic failure of my trusty Latitude D610. Whilst it was never intended to be a main machine in the long term, I hoped it would be a reasonable budget stop-gap and a decent machine for working on the road.

I went with the following spec, mostly because I needed it to ship quickly in time for the Munich trip:

• Intel Atom Processor N270 (1.60GHz, 533MHz, 512K cache)
• 1024MB 533MHz Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM
• 10.1″ Widescreen WSVGA with Truelife (1024×600)
• 160GB (5,400rpm) SATA Hard Drive

It shipped with XP Home which ran like a dog was stripped out, along with Dell’s bundled crapware, to be replaced by a dual-boot of Win7RC and Ubuntu (of which more later). Since the OS switch I’ve been pretty pleased with the performance, sure it’s not lightning fast and you wouldn’t want to do anything intensive on it, but for basic coding and office admin it’s fine.

The two big problems with the machine for me are the crappy little screen (I thought I could live with it, I can’t) which feels all the tinyier compared to the edge-to-edge keyboard and the fact that they’ve chosen a widescreen format, leaving you very little vertical real-esatate. If you use a few Firefox plugins, you can forget seeing the webpage until you’ve scrolled down past the toolbars, it’s that small. If they’d have kept a standard ratio screen, this would be far more usable. The casing would have to have been a bit deeper, but that would have made room for a larger battery for longer life.

The other big problem is the trackpad with its “integrated” buttons, basically meaning that two portions of the trackpad service are reserved for right and left click. The Space allocated is so small, though that unless you are absoluetly pin-point accurate with your tap, you’ll jump the mouse pointer across the screen. After having done this a few times, and ocassionally ending up clicking something I really didn’t want, I’ve given up and now plug in a spare mouse if I’m using it for more than a few minutes.

Knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t buy a Dell Inspiron Mini 10, in fact there’s not a budget laptop in Dell’s range right now that I would shell out for. It’s not until you get into the £700-800 budget range, where the XPS16 looks to be a good machine.