Moreover, I don’t really like the whole dated category approach to this site. If I find the time, I may switch it over to using tags, as it should have been from the get-go. Edit: success with tags!

First off, see if there are any better prices out there. Traditionally, Best Buy is not the best source for cheap systems.

Next, I live in Vancouver, Washington. We have a 7.7% sales tax. Right across the border is Portland, Oregon — 0% sales tax. That’s instantly going to save me $100.10. In order for this to work, you have to go into the store, not online; unless of course you’re willing to just have it shipped to someone who lives in Portland.

Next, search for coupons for Best Buy. These are somewhat rare, but there are some 10%-off-anything coupons that surface from time to time. Make sure that what you are buying falls into the “acceptable categories” as explicitly noted on the coupon. Can’t find any currently.

Next, find gift cards. Ask your friends if they have any they want to sell. Look at online for sale forums. Check eBay. As long as the person selling the gift card is reputable, this is a great way to save money. For example, I just purchased a $250 Best Buy gift card for $238 buy it now -$23.80 for Bing cashback, -$4.76 for eBay’s cashback incentive plan, -$2.38 because I paid with PayPal through my credit card. That makes the final price for this $250 gift card $207.06; a 17.18% discount.

Next, as I mentioned previously, pay with credit card (assuming you pay it off, and have a cash back incentive plan). This is an easy 1-2%.

Finally, don’t accept any upselling that Best Buy will try on you. You don’t need the extended warranty, you don’t need the new peripherals. Don’t be a sucker for their highest margin area of the business.

With these principles applied, I’m going to take a $1400.10 laptop (including tax) and get it for $1084.80 (5*207.06 + 50 – 0.50).

I’m working on a MightyROM install from ~May 2009, so at most 3 months stale. At some point, there began to be lag upon text entry when sending SMS messages. It would take about 200 milliseconds to respond to text input from the keyboard, and the lag mounted with extended input. At the beginning I was able to finish typing an entire text of ~130 chars meanwhile it was only about halfway done displaying what I typed. More recently, it has further issues; sometimes when I input, instead of outputting the character I type, it outputs the same character over and over. No idea why, incredibly frustrating.

Another main issue this device is having is that sometimes the keyboard will stop working altogether. Only a soft reset is able to restore functionality to the keyboard. Pulling my hair out.

I saw a MightyROM update that said:

Text Lag Removed.
This was done in the previous release, although comes with a warning, therefore I shall explain. While in “Threaded-SMS” mode, previously you would see your 0/130 text count in the top left of the screen. It has been noted that this is the reason for texting lag. The counter has been removed and you will now notice that texting lag has been completely resolved. Small price to pay for a responsive keyboard.

I’m really hoping this fixes BOTH of my issues. It might make this device usable again. I just installed this new version of MightyROM, so we shall see.

Edit: Confirmed problem #1 is gone. Problem #2 appears to be related to a loose ribbon cable, which essentially means (fixable) poor device design.

I had an elaborate scheme of how I would resize my 32GB partition to <16GB, then direct copy it over to the new drive, then have it automagically work, but after copying there was some corrupt data, so I decided to just start over. Nothing worth saving anyway. That’s the beauty of a netbook, no local storage is required.

Now for the benchmarking, I used Bart’s Stuff Test 5 for hdd speed benchmarking, and these are the results:
on the old hdd:
3019 blocks written, 754MB
Max/s: 5.2MB
Avg/s: 4.3MB

on the new hdd:
3059 blocks written, 765MB
Max/s: 23.8MB
Avg/s: 23.6MB

Woah! Huge difference… I can really tell, everything is a lot more responsive, and Windows 7 runs very smoothly.

So I purchased a 16GB Runcore aka the fastest 16GB SSD you can get, used from [H]. It might arrive before vacation, but I won’t plan on it.

So I installed Windows 7 RC 1 with a portable DVD drive (easier than the OS X process), it took about 45 minutes and either had all of the drivers, or Windows Update was able to locate the missing or outdated drivers. Two quick observations after a few hours of use.

The new hibernate is freaking awesome. Historically, windows hibernate (saving memory contents to disk and physically powering off the machine) took a long time to cycle down and cycle up, so you may as well shut down in most cases. I haven’t actually hibernated since I first saw it in Windows 2000 (XP?). With my Vostro 1500, Windows 7 will hibernate in about 10 seconds and wake up in about 15 seconds. On the netbook, it’s about 25 seconds down and 40 seconds up. A little slower than waking from suspend, but the fact that it’s not constantly sucking on the battery is worth the peace of mind.

The screen real estate is improved over OS X, or even another windows. I would say that OS X is not ideal for displays with very limited vertical resolution, as is the case with the Mini 9. It has the bar on the top which can’t be moved elsewhere, so that decreases your vertical real estate even more. And the dock on any side but the bottom just doesn’t feel right. There’s a hack on mydellmini.com that allows you to decrease the “size” of each of the applications that run, but it is very shotty. Windows 7 with the taskbar on the left allows for the max amount of vertical real estate, and it looks natural.

And since Microsoft has better relationships with hardware vendors, the hardware drivers are more recent and function better. I can really tell that everything is running more smoothly. Since I’m on the slowest possible SDHC drive for the Mini, OS X seemed to lag at points from just typical use. I’m not seeing the same with Windows 7.

Liking it so far, I suspect that I will use it as my primary OS from now on.

The ebay post said “only works with Dell Mini Bios Verson A00″. Wow they weren’t kidding. I have A04 (was planning on the A05 upgrade at some point), and upon insertion of the battery, it looked to charge and was fully functional, but the LEDs were going crazy! Flashing red and white, they really wanted you to know that this battery is not supported. The flashing was annoying enough; if there was no other issue with this battery I would have still wanted to downgrade to get it working right.

So I was able to locate on the mydellmini forums a utility that someone (somms?) put together called flashBIOS. This app has the capability of creating bootable media (I used a usb thumb drive) with a dos BIOS flashing utility. It even comes with all of the Dell Mini 9 (and even the Dell A90) firmware versions out to date. This is a sweet app, had to archive it.

Download flashBIOSv1.51.exe

It really is self explanatory. Start up the app, follow instructions and flash. I was down to A00 in less than 10 minutes after downloading this.

Works great now, like a charm. Only issues I really have with it are:

• The single quote (‘) key is in a really weird place, to the right of the space bar.
• The right shift key is to the right of the arrows, which is really weird.
• The keyboard is pretty cramped in general, I’m not exactly sure what % of typical this keyboard is, but it feels about 90%.

That’s it for now! Everything with OS X worked out of the box, pretty amazing.

Anyone interested in witnessing greatness?

Man, I hope my freaking mini comes by then. April 30th is the latest estimate, grrrr.