Rigues on the Dell Mini 9: it's “Apple's netbook”

Anyone following MacMagazine has known since the beginning of October 2008 that the Dell Inspiron Mini 910 runs very well on Mac OS X. Also, in December we published a table here that showed that he and MSI Wind were the two best netbooks for make yourself Hackintosh.

And speaking of MSI Wind (aka Mobo White 1050), do you remember that my friend Rafael Rigues had installed Leopard in one of them? Shortly thereafter, Realtek even released Wi-Fi drivers for these machines, something Rigues expected while writing its article. Now, he has put his hands on a Dell Mini 9, has already installed Mac OS X and brings us feedback on his experience.

Mac OS X on a Dell Mini 9

According to Rigues, the Dell Mini 9 “an Apple netbook without the apple logo on the back”. The combination is not absolutely perfect because hibernation does not work and the sound makes a few noises every now and then. Other than that, everything runs very well, including sound, network, Wi-Fi, card reader, 3G modem, webcam, Bluetooth, battery measurement and mode sleep. In addition, he made available an ABNT2 keyboard map for those who are going to dive in the same adventure.

The Apple netbook runs OS X with much better performance than an equivalent machine with Windows XP. D boot in 20 seconds, do not complain about multiple open programs and run Leopard with all the visual effects of large desktops, no frills from Home Basic system or, worse, Starter. He sleeps in a second, wakes up in another. The battery, with Wi-Fi and in typical use, can last three hours and 20 minutes, on average. And he's cute, with rounded corners, white on the outside and silver / black on the inside.

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You need to be careful when installing: do not install printer drivers or languages ​​that you do not intend to use. I installed the system in English only, and in the end I had about 6.6GB of free space on the 16GB SSD. From what I read, it is possible to install OS X on a Dell Mini with 8GB SSD, but that requires more juggling for the system to fit in there. I supplemented the disk space with an 8GB SD card in the internal reader. If you need more space, just put a bigger card.

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Exceptional performance. Boot in 23 seconds, to be exact. One second to sleep, another to wake up. I ran Firefox while listening to music on iTunes, watched movies (episodes of TV series with DVD resolution, 720 Ă— 480 pixels) in full screen in QuickTime, opened four 7MP images at the same time in Pixelmator, adjusted their colors and I resized them. I even played World of Goo, all without gagging. The machine only complained when playing a high definition video (1280 Ă— 720 pixels, H.264), but it was too much to ask for from the poor Atom processor. Neither he nor the integrated GPU was made for this.

It is worth checking out the article.