Dell Inspiron Mini 9 review

Since Asus sparked the ultra-portable craze, other laptop manufacturers have been queuing up to enter the fray. A few weeks ago, Dell dropped in with its own take, the Dell Inspiron Mini 9, which promises all the typical netbook light-weight and low-cost construction, but with the quality build and after sales care that has made Dell so popular. Hardware-wise there's not a huge amount to make the Mini 9 stand out from the mini-sub notebook crowd . It packs the same 1.6GHz Intel Atom CPU as all the rest, a respectable, if not outstanding 1GB of RAM, a choice of XP or Linux (although recent gripes about the drive partition sizes have made XP the better choice so far), and you get a choice of 8GB or 16GB SSDs. These actually have a couple of big advantages over capacious HDDs - firstly, it means the Mini 9 is whisper quiet. No scratch that - it's not quiet ; it doesn't make a noise at all. No grinding discs, no CPU fan, nada. Secondly, its boot time is incredibly swift. Resuming XP ... (link)