The mini10-v finally arrived!

Didn’t care to install xp on the harddrive it came on, immediately put the SSD OCZ-Vertex in (with alot of help of roedie). It wasn’t as easy as I saw on a lot of posts though, I really thought we were gonna break the keyboard in half …

Anyway, to further extend the life of the SSD i searched around a bit on how to work the thingy best. Found a few basic rules of thumb:
1. don’t defrag the thing. screws it up.
2. trim it every now and then (luckily the drive came with the right firmware 1.10 which supports trimming) if your OS doesn’t support it. Right now, it looks like only Windows 7 will be able to support it from the OS itself, so with anything lower it’s done manually. Found a tool for that on the OCX forums.

Anyway, installed XP first, then Ubuntu alongside (both on 16 GB partitions) and they both work like a charm. Perform well, xp driver disk from Dell is very handy … Ubuntu works out of the box, didn’t have to pull any tricks to get the hardware working.

Couple of other things:
1. I had to tweak the touchpad to my likings. The default settings are nearly unworkable. Touchpad has a lot of nice features, but they don’t work for me though … so I turned them all off. And I don’t particularly like the integration of the buttons into the mousepad.
2. The six-cell battery is kinda big (REALLY BIG). Kinda looks ugly on the whole (overall very nice) appearance of the mini.
3. The screen is nice and clear. Very usable outside as well!
4. The keyboard is awesome. Nice and big, typing is a breeze…
5. Battery life is great. But i’ll report back in a couple of months ofcourse ;) But right now I can use it all day with one load. Sweet huh?!

basically, I love the thing!