The last couple of days been just gorgeous outside. Now that I have a newly hackintoshed Dell Mini 9, I’ve spent the last couple of days outside with it instead of indoors with the big machine. I have to say that, for my needs, the device has worked admirably as a stand in for the big machine. It blows my mind the number of negative reviews there are out on the internet about the device.
Yes, it’s underpowered. Yes, it does have a small screen. Yes, it doesn’t have a large hard drive. Yet, these are the things are also it’s strong points. Having such an “underpowered” machine makes you really think about what you’re going to be able to do with the machine. It forces you to make compromises – which in the end, doesn’t really affect the quality of your work, but may end up saving you a ton money.
One thing that I’ve learn already with only one day of ownership of my Dell Mini 9 is to be very frugal on what applications I’ve installed. I only got the 16 gig SSD option on the Mini 9, so I knew that I wouldn’t be putting large applications like Photoshop or MS Office on the machine. After the jump, I’ll go into what I’ve installed on my machine — and I’m surprised I got it all on there with room to spare.
After some reading online and playing around with my Mini 9, I was able to get two finger scrolling and sleep mode working. I also found out that I was using a much older version of the DellEFI program. After the jump some details.
I just found out about a feature in Mac OS X that I think is absolutely great — the ability to create encrypted volumes to store confidential data. My father and I needed to exchange some sensitive financial information over the internet recently and we both looked around for a solution to do this securely with email. Of course, much to our confusion/delight, there are a ton of solutions out there. One of the solutions I found was to create an encrypted disk volume — we didn’t use this particular method for our email exchange, but there isn’t saying anything that we could not have.