Category Archives: hardware

“Well, the good news sir” so the Dell phone rep tells me “I see here you have 364 days remaining on your 1 year warranty”. 24hrs after delivery, my brand new micro mini subnotebook is cold and refusing to boot. This after blue screening of death on me 5 min in to an important client presentation. Ah well, these things happen. In which we learn, the importance power point in every meeting is often overstated.

My little Dell Inspiron Mini, your candle burned too bright. You gave me about 45 combined minutes of Windows XP before intermittently, then completely dying out. I blame the solid state drive (these early days of SSDs, not so solid) the tech thought it was the network card, but whatever. The unit is winging it’s way home to Dell for a new one. Apparently I am not the first to have problems. Could also explain why the backorder on inpiron 9’s is at least two weeks (One theory: Intel Atom shortages, another: a lot of the units don’t work right).

Anyway, since a lot of folks have asked, here’s my abbreviated review of an abbreviated mini… Continue reading →