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115 days ago
One of photos was included in this online guide under the Edworthy Park/Douglas Fir Trail section.
217 days ago
The good: After updating my BIOS from A01 to A04, I am please to report that many of the issues I was having in regards to the system recovering from sleep mode and/or crashing with a blue screen of death have disappeared. The bad: I ran into a drive space issue when I tried to install both Garmin’s City Navigator 2008 and Topo Canada v4. Topo Canada is huge, measuring over 5GB, which takes up more than 1/3 of my drive space. Once I moved some photos from the Mini9 to my desktop machine I was able to squeeze both products on, but I am giving serious thought to getting a larger SSD. I guess with the upcoming release of the Windows 7 RC, I will be reloading my machine anyway, so that should help clear out a lot of the bloat that I have accumulated on the Mini9 since I installed it last. I’m also planning on putting Windows 7 RC onto my desktop machine so I can give Homegroups and Media Center a real test. On a side note, I managed to grab some more spare parts for my Dell ...
295 days ago
It’s no secret that I have been a big fan of Windows Vista and I don’t think it deserves the bad reputation it has earned. That said, there was no way I was going to try running it on my Dell Mini9 with only 1GB of RAM. However, in the couple of months I have had this machine the experience of using Windows XP has been painful for me. XP is showing its age and it is time for it to be retired to Microsoft’s Operating System Hall of Fame. With all the positive reviews Windows 7 (aka Windows 6.1) has been getting, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I would be giving it a try. I downloaded the Beta as soon as it was released and immediately installed it into a virtual machine at home and on an aging Dell GX240 at work. It certainly seemed to be useable enough on those low resource platforms so running on my shiny Dell Mini9 shouldn’t be a problem. Plenty of bloggers have written about their experiences and they seem to be almost universally positive, so what do I have to lose? ...
338 days ago
I've had the new system for almost a week now and I love it. I have gotten used to the smaller keyboard much faster than I expected -- in fact using a full size keyboard now seems cumbersome because my fingers need to move so much further when typing. I never typed with much more than four fingers and my thumbs anyway so I suspect the transition was much easier for me than someone who actually types correctly. That's not to say that there are no issues with typing on a keyboard that small. First, Dell had to move some of the keys to non-standard locations which makes it difficult to type in the dark. On a regular keyboard I am pretty much able to type away because I know where everything is, but with the small keyboard I have to stop and actually look for certain keys. Which ones give me the biggest issues? Trying to type an apostrophe and quotation marks because they key has been moved from the left side of the Enter key down to the right of the spacebar. I would have rather ...
344 days ago
My Christmas present to myself arrived today – my ultra small laptop from Dell. My goals for this new machine are two-fold: 1) Remove all of my personal software and email from my main work laptop (Dell Latitude D620) 2) Use this for new laptop for Geocaching and in-vehicle navigation. (All my GPS toys, basically.) My first impression, even before opening the box was “Wow, this thing is tiny!” The Purolator tag showed the entire contents weighed just four lbs. The box it shipped in was so small I swore only half the package had arrived – I swear I’ve seen hard drives get shipped in bigger boxes. Dell seems to have fallen into the Apple trap – what is with the shiny surface on this thing? I can’t even remove it from its wrapping without getting it messed up with finger prints. Note to vendors – these things are tools, not fashion accessories. I don’t need designer colors and I don’t need shiny surfaces. Leave that to the Mac people. I plugged it in and fired it up right ...
