Our second Mini 9 arrived in the office today. This one is for Andy and myself to use whilst out of the office. Richard has successfully upgraded his to XP Professional, so we had to try to push the bar out a little further – we’re running Vista Business.
I have not spent any time tweaking or prodding yet. I used install media with SP1 included and obliterated the partition on the SSD, then installed the drivers from Dell where necessary, and a driver for the battery hardware that Vista itself suggested rather than the Dell solution.
I have disabled System Restore to claw back some disk space, but even so, prior to installing the bits of Office 2007 we need (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote) I had around 7Gb free. That’s enough – we’re going to be using this for note taking and document writing, not heavy lifting.
Performance-wise, it’s quite nippy. Aero is disabled, and the sidebar is off (it’s a small screen, why waste bits of it?) and I have well over half the system ram available at idle. Right now I have no complaints at all.
Depending on performance I may well look at upgrading the RAM to 2Gb, but in the short term I’m sure I have an SD card kicking around somewhere I could use for ReadyBoost, should the need arise.
Why Vista? UAC. Shocked? I probably would have been a few months ago, but in all seriousness, UAC means that it’s much easier to run with limited-rights user accounts and still be able to do admin-stuff if the need arises. You can’t do that with XP Pro.