Introduction

Are you tired of lugging around your 15 or 17 inch laptop in what appears to be a suit case strapped to your shoulder or back? Are your friends thoroughly tired of how you try to impress them daily with your desktop replacement mammoth notebook? Well now you can throw away that suitcase and impress them with something that can easily fit in a small shoulder bag or backpack and will never cease to amaze them.

Today I am proud to bring to you a review of one of the hottest little items on the computer market, the Dell Inspiron Mini 9 Netbook.

Most of us have probably seen the Dell Mini 9 or other netbooks around the internet, maybe a coworker or friend has one, or you have seen one in a local computer store. And many of us have already read other reviews of the Dell Mini 9. Today I am going to try to approach my review from a practicality angle; will the Mini 9 replace your current laptop or handheld? Can you really carry this device everywhere? Does it have the power to do the things you need to do on a daily basis? And is it worth getting this over a smaller standard notebook? The quick and easy answer; yes absolutely! But quick and easy will never teach us anything and it won't give you the chance to find out all the little nuances of the Mini 9 that I think you should know about.

I will be going quite in depth into the Dell Mini 9, hopefully without boring you. I have tried to touch on some key subjects that I feel are necessary for you to know and learn about. I will also be providing you with some essential tweaks for your Mini 9 to increase performance and hard drive space.

The Product

The first thing I would like to say is that this netbook (and others for that matter) are smaller than any picture or video can truly convey. You must get one in your hands to fully appreciate just how small it really is. To see the numbers in the spec’s I thought was ok for me, but once I got it, I was thoroughly shocked at its tiny size.

The box it is shipped in starts right off clueing you into that fact. The box itself measures 13 ¼ x 12 ¾ x 5 ¼ inches (LxWxH) and is the smallest box that I have ever seen Dell use for one of their own products. Upon opening the box, I was somewhat surprised to see the lack of extensive packaging materials. As you can see in the below picture, it uses two foam pieces on each side of the Mini to hold it in place and that is all. Most people would view this as inadequate, but in reality, the box itself is very sturdy and solid and the Mini 9 is held snugly in place, so what they used is enough to protect it.