The MacBook Mini Project
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.
Cristiano on Tech/Life







