Dell Mini 9 Impressions – Windows Vista Edition

Take a look at this.

When you have 3.2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo you don’t tend notice slower boot times. I had no idea Symantec Endpoint 11 was such a resource hog. It has certainly faltered compared to its predecessor. Norton Antivirus 2009, on the other hand, has improved significantly.

Windows Vista by itself isn’t too bad, but once you install an antivirus application: things starting taking a bit longer. Installing Windows Vista was relatively painless. With Office 2007 (Word, Outlook, Excel, Powerpoint) installed, and a few minor programs installed, I’m sitting at 6.49 GB of free space left. Not too bad. I can get rid of the 2.28 GB pagefile and free up some more space, but I don’t feel the need to do that just yet.

Of course, Windows Vista is working swimmingly with the Dell Mini 9. All the hardware is working and it’s nice to have a working sleep option. I’ve spent a bit of time visiting BlackViper.com’s Vista services tweak guide and other minor tweaks just to slim down Vista as much as I can. Of course, I used vLite to pre-slim the install file, but there’s always something else you can tweak.

I’ve chosen Google’s Chrome as my default web browser due to the lack of screen space. I will miss Opera’s mouse gestures though. I’ve also fallen back to my Windows 98 and 15″ monitor days when I would auto-hide the task bar. Damn, those were archaic times.

What’s next? I’ll try to throw some games onto this beast. Definitely something 2-D, but perhaps some light 3-D as well. Suggestions?