23
Feb
Dell apparently really doesn’t want to be competitive in the NetBook market space. The Mini 9 was OK and a reasonable option. The Mini 10 was supposed to be all that and a bit better, thanks to a bigger screen and keyboard, among other things.
And then they did something ridiculously stupid. The RAM configuration is “fixed” at 1GB. It doesn’t start at 1GB like every other NetBook out there (a ridiculous limitation imposed by Microsoft in an attempt to protect their Vista market). It is fixed at 1GB. No after-market upgrades are currently possible on the Mini 10. What a bunch of morons.
In the meantime, if you want a 10″ NetBook model today, grab the Asus 1000HE. They haven’t made the mistake of artificially limiting the hardware.
Oliver said,
If I remember correctly from a test configuration on Dell’s website, you can’t get the mini 9 with more than a gig either. Whether an after market self-upgrade is possible, I don’t know.
Seth said,
Oliver:
You’re correct that the Mini 9 also only comes with 1GB. All of the NetBooks do as part of a deal they had to cut with Microsoft to be able to continue to sell them with Windows XP. But all the vendors also realize that 1GB is the absolute minimum that anyone should be running on one of these devices, and that most folks buying them are going to want to upgrade the RAM. Even the folks at Acer, who made it unnecessarily difficult to upgrade the RAM on their AspireOne models did make it possible.
Dell’s decision to not have an after-market upgrade path for the RAM on the Mini 10 is a huge step backwards and truly a dealbreaker on that model.
Oliver said,
Then again, these are netbooks… what else other than Firefox, Pidgin and Skype do you need to be running
In all honesty, my 2133 has 2 GB and whenever I check the task manager, it’s using less than a gig. And yes, I self-downgraded to XP.
So not sure that it’s really a deal breaker. That said, memory is so darn cheap that, when I upgrade my 2133 (to the 2140, most likely), I’ll for sure get 2GB
Seth said,
You will almost never see a system using 100% of the RAM. Actually the split you are seeing is about normal. There is user-mode and kernel mode and Windows splits the total RAM so that the OS has room to work and the user applications have room to play. And as applications get close to their portion of the split stuff gets swapped to the HD swap file (virtual RAM). Windows is actually running exactly the way it is supposed to in your case. If you only had 1 GB of RAM you’d be limited to 512MB for user-mode applications and your system would perform worse. I can almost guarantee it.
Would a system running XP Home with 1GB of RAM be tolerable? Sure. But 2GB (or even 1.5, which is where the AspireOne maxes out) would be better. I actually do run in to that barrier every now and then on my AspireOne based on having IE and FireFox running for too long and various plugins and whatnot staing resident and soaking up RAM. A quick restart of them brings my system back to its happy place. And I’d be doing that a lot more with less RAM.
There is no good reason for Dell to have made the decision to limit it in that way. Ultimately it means that they have positioned themselves at a competitive disadvantage which is just a stupid thing to do. I cannot imagine that they are saving sufficient money in the manufacturing process to reasonably justify this move. And it means that they will almost certainly lose sales to people who actually bother to compare specs on various systems. That is stupid from where I’m sitting.
Oliver said,
Actually, I believe I turned swap off a while ago (need to check if I ever re-enabled it). No point in having stuff getting swapped out when you have plenty of physical RAM. My “real” machine (Thinkpad X60t) has been running without swap for a long time. Never hit a problem.
I’ve had several laptops (at work) running XP with just 1GB, and they run a lot more heavy-duty stuff than I subject my 2133 to (I wouldn’t want to run Eclipse on that tiny screen… or bog down the machine with a database running in the background).
Of course, it also helps to do a clean install and not have a ton of unnecessary crapware installed and auto-started. It’s amazing how much the initial install of the OS on machines is bloated with crapware.
As for the Dell… well, they may lose sales, but I am not convinced it’s that many people who’d want an upgrade. The blogosphere isn’t necessarily representative of the average user. Of course, nowadays (given the cheap RAM) that a lot of laptops come with 3 or 4 GB out of the box, even people who don’t need more than 1 GB might be lead to believe they really need more.
Seth said,
Yes, uninstalling all the crapware or doing a clean install is a good idea. Disabling the swap file is not. Just bad news. I’d love to see some documented evidence of actual system performance improvement from such a move. In the meantime it leaves a system in a less stable state because it prevents paging if it is appropriate. Some apps/drivers like to page out to disk even when the RAM isn’t full, and there is nothing wrong with that. No, it doesn’t guarantee that you’ll crash and have problems, but it also doesn’t really help and doesn’t make a lot of sense to do, IMO.
As for Dell in particular, if folks in the USA are just buying by name then they’ll probably buy a Dell or an HP since those are names they’ll recognize. And if any of them actually compare the specs they’ll see that the Dell will come up short on that category. I suppose it is a stretch to think that consumers will educate themselves on the comparitive options prior to buying a product, but I like to give them the benefit of the doubt. Dell would have to win on price, and I don’t see a significant cost savings coming from this to help them on that front.
Craig6z said,
I ordered an Asus 1000HE from Amazon yesterday (they are backordered 2-3 weeks BTW). Agree it looks like the best bang for the buck. Any thoughts on an slim external drive? Bestbuy has an LG with LightScribe for $89, anything in particular worth looking at for less money?
DJ said,
I was going to get a DELL but NO RAM UPGRADE made me look elswhere. I’m a good example of a consumer that would drain the life out of a netbook for what I need to do and soryy DELL 1 gig is not good enough. Dell is notorious for bringing quality built products but always under specs compare to competititor. Maybe they need to fire their marketing department.
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