Jumped on a sale on a refurbished Dell Inspiron Mini 10 (1010) last week. Great little system!
Intel Atom Z530, 1GB memory (yeah, likely stuck at 1GB, but that’s okay, it gets the job done), 160GB 5200RPM HDD, Intel GMA500, 6-cell battery. Windows indicated it will hold 6+ hours on a full charge! This will be a fantastic platform for classes, homework, and roaming around over the summer.
First thing I did was try a live Ubuntu 10.4 Netbook Remix. Linux could do fantastic things if it has hardware support on the right platforms! The problem on this particular system is the lack of driver support for the Intel GMA500 graphics hardware. Just doesn’t seem to be there for the soon-to-be-released Ubuntu 10.4.
Windows 7, however, runs like a champ with the recently released graphics driver! The stock Windows XP Home install ran with a hefty memory footprint, pushing over 850MB at idle! WIndows 7 running with Google Chrome, Pidgin IM and Live Mail idles at 640MB! The multithreaded Z530 has, so far, handled everything I’ve thrown at it. Mostly in software installs, but running an IE session with a few tabs, Chrome with a few tabs and a software installer and a Microsoft download produced only slight UI hiccups. My wife and I also watched an entire episode of The Office streaming over Netflix the other night!
Until tonight I had an Ubuntu 9.10 NBR partition, but have changed the bootloader back to the Windows 7 bootloader. GRUB just isn’t all that pretty.
Now to play with some Office 2010!
