Cristiano on Tech/Life The MacBook Mini Project
Dec
14
When I replaced my MacBook with a Mac Mini setup I was always planning to invest some time into a netbook. I recently ordered a (RED) Dell Mini 10v with the plan to turn it into a hackintosh. After a few days (*cough* weeks) of tinkering I now have a machine I’m happy with.
In short: It’s a (RED), as in the charity sponsoring colour, Dell Mini 10v that retails for about £250. It has a 1.6GHz Atom processor, 2GB ram (custom), a 1024×600 screen, and a 160GB hard drive. I installed Windows 7 and Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.1 on it and things are running smoothly. Here are some photos and some notes from my experience.
The cool
- I love the colour and form factor. I wish Apple would make a (RED) laptop with a 10 to 12 inch screen.
- I installed 2GB of ram (easier than I expected) and made some more changes to the hardware by installing a different wireless module and a bluetooth module.
- WiFi (802.11n) and Bluetooth work
- Sleeping works for the most parts
- Multi touch works including 2 finger scrolling, and 3 finger swiping
- It dual boot with Windows 7
- I managed to sync some parts of OS X through Dropbox, making this machine an almost virtual copy of my workstation when it comes to some of the every day tasks.
- I installed a few handy apps to make the most out of the small screen size and small trackpad.
- Quicksilver: Most of you will know this app, but for those of you who don’t think of it as every app and document under the tip of your fingers, without having to touch the trackpad
- Megazoomer: Zoom any app to full screen. Very handy for browsing, although it seems to be a bit temperamental sometimes.
- Caffeine: Prevents your machine from falling asleep when you don’t want it to. Handy for when you’re giving a presentation or when you’re watching a YouTube video.
- DropBox: Simply the best app for sharing documents across multiple machines. I can’t live without anymore.
- 1Password: Never need to remember your password again. Combine it with DropBox and your passwords are synced across all your machines.
The not so cool
- Installing was a bit of a pain as it required a lot of reading, diving into tutorials, and most of all knowledge of both OS X and Windows. The most useful resource for everything seemed to be this Dell Mini specific forum.
- I don’t dare to upgrade to 10.6.2 because things might break. Add to that the fact that making a bootable backup is even harder, it doesn’t make for a very reliable machine that you would want to count on for your important documents.
- This is not the fastest machine. It can play SD quality video fine, but the new generation of online videos, including YouTube, seem to be very focussed on HD video, which this machine really can’t handle.
- The standard battery only gives about 2.5 hours of battery, about the same (or even less) as my MacBook did. Where is all of that power going?! I though these machines were supposed to be energy efficient! I had a look at a 6 cell battery which gives about 5hour+ battery life but they are hard to find in the UK and ridiculously expensive. I had a 6 cell battery with my Dell Mini 10 (non-V) but crazy enough that one didn’t fit on the Dell Mini 10v. Bastards at Dell!
- Hibernation doesn’t work (for now) and I can live with that. The real problem though is sleeping. Although the machine sleeps, if I leave it overnight it will drain quite a bit of the battery (20%). I will have to see if this can be fixed.
- I really need to bring a USB mouse when I’m off to the Netherlands for Christmas for 2 weeks. The trackpad is nice, but if you want to do some real work a external mouse is a must. The keyboard is quite useable though.
The unknown
- I’m not sure if the VGA out works, I need to hook it up to a monitor.
The future
- I might one day take out the Dell logos on the front and back and replace them with something more Apple. I already looked around and found a few articles where people laser cut an Apple logo into their machine and added a glowing apple in it’s place. It seems to require a laser cutter though, which I don’t have.
- I might order a US layout keyboard one day to replace this one. I already set my keyboard to US which means I can type as I’m used to as long as I don’t look at the keys.
- If I hit the F1 key the screen flickers, goes black, and that’s it. This button is somehow wired to do something special that the OS X install doesn’t like. There are some fixes for this which I need to look into.
The photos
Very nice. Have you tried it for coding yet? I think there are a few places in London that do custom laser cutting. Can’t remember their details though. Possibly ask around at hackspace?
No I haven’t yet. I’m planning to setup my dev setup on it and see if I can live with it. The keyboard took some getting used to but it’s actually not bad. The big question is if TextMate will be even remotely useable on it.
The RED colour looks very stunning!
I think you may be stuck with that high sleep-mode discharge rate.
It’s one of those unsung apple voodoo features that make me like apple hardware so much; they have really good power management.
Last time I checked (Which was a while ago) the sleep-charge (the power needed to maintain sleep mode) is a factor of at least *10* better than other notebooks, on apple hardware. Possibly other manufacturors have closed that gap a bit. Still, I’m not surprised you’re losing 20% overnight.
Hibernate is not that great of a solution; one of the disadvantages of today’s hardware is that the time-to-enter-hibernate mode has skyrocketed. Harddisks have not really become any faster for continuous block write, but memory size has more than quadrupled since hibernate has become a mainstream technology. My macbook takes nearly a minute to enter hibernate mode as it has to write 4GB to disk. Still, compared to losing that much charge it may be preferable. SSDs won’t help much; continuous write is the one area where they barely beat harddisks, and it’s a real drain on your SSD’s total lifetime (writes are bad for SSDs).
Excellent battery life (6+ hours of real world use without a massive battery pack) is easy with today’s hardware. It’s one of the few places one can out-apple apple (because the hardware you need to do it is probably below apple’s needs for extremely high quality screens and such), and nobody seems to be doing it.
Intel Atom Z *with* appropriate low-power south/north bridges, or even better, ARM-based netbooks (hope you like linux!), together with smart power management, and you’ll easily get 6 hours instead of the 2.5 you’re currently getting.
YEah, sorry, but I really don’t like Linux
Looks sweet. I hope you can actually move beyond the “getting everything to work” stage to the “actually working” stage soon.
I was wondering though, since you are going to be back in the Netherlands for two weeks, wouldn’t it be possible just to pack the Mac Mini with you and use it there?
Good point there! I have a special bag for the Mac Mini so I could cary it to NL. The problem though is finding a screen to use. I think I can borrow one at my parents, but I’m not sure about what to do when we’re at Mel’s parents.
In the long run, the purpose of this machine is also to have a portable device for meetings here in London. I already noticed I can walk around with this laptop for hours, where doing that with a 13″ Macbook is just self-torture.
very cool comp. i think it is time for me to get away from my desktop and get cought up with the times, and get a laptop.
Rumour has it that Apple wants everyone caged by their App Store with their mythical tablet. Will it be useful or will it be just another MacBook Air? Apple has to listen to the market and it’s consumers: We want a full netbook. We want MacBook Air 10″ (http://macbookair10.net/). Come read what we propose, sign our petition and spread the word.