My new Dell Mini 10v: The First Day
Since I haven’t bought a laptop in over 3 years, I decided to follow the trend and pick up one of the ultra-portable notebooks / netbooks. After reading some reviews, I picked up this Dell Mini 10v. It arrived today, only seven days after I placed the order via a Dell Chat.
Rather than offering an extensive review, I wanted to share some first thoughts.
Arrival
I was extremely happy to find out that the packaging it was shipped in was both secure and minimal: very few things came in the box, and the box itself was small enough to hold with one hand. The Mini 10v doesn’t have a DVD drive, but it came with a copy of Windows XP and the restore disks anyways. Hurray! That fact got a few chuckles in the office.
The AC adapter is not a brick, but instead, looks like my Nokia cell phone charger! Very nice. Those brick monsters with two cords make portable laptops oxymoronic.
First Boot
The Mini 10v I ordered came with Windows XP SP3. I use XP at home and at the office, so it’s cool, but I’m wondering what happened to Vista. Where is my voucher for Windows 7? This is an eight (8!!) year old Operating System. I will be looking into the Ubuntu 9 Netbook Remix very shortly.
The netbook doesn’t come with Microsoft Office unless you’ve installed it, but I’m very glad to have Microsoft Works with the Office 2007 compatibility pack installed by default. But this is insane: Internet Explorer 6. IE6 is the default browser – the broken one circa August 2001. I honestly feel like I’ve been cheated, and need to speak to someone at Dell about it.
More immediately, some fixable things were show-stoppers:
- The “function keys”, (Fn-F7 to mute, for example) were not installed. This took me a while to figure out, I just thought they weren’t responding or something. After navigating the Dell website, I found the utility (or via FTP) and installed it. Very bad form, Dell.
- Windows is installed with 120dpi fonts by default on the Mini 10v. I love this font setting on my big LCD monitor at home or at work, but on the 1024×576 screen, this is bad news. Most notably many dialogs cut off on the bottom. In the Dell Wireless utility I could not press “Apply”, “OK”, “Cancel” without blindly pressing Tab and Enter. So after changing the font size to 96dpi, and restarting, the dialogs became useful again.
- The preference for “Large Icons” out of the box is … questionable given the small screen. Cranking down the icon size is available in the Display Properties.
Hardware
Out of the box, the hardware looks and feels way slicker than I expected it to. It doesn’t suffer from the same “hollow rattle” as some of the old Dell laptops I’ve owned or used; it feels solid and well put-together. The screen hinges particularly stand out as being hard-effing-core. Having three USB ports is pretty great.
My only concerns are about the touchpad and the screen glare. The screen is shiny. I mean SHINY. I’m sitting here between two other laptops and my LCD, and the Mini 10v is a mirror compared to the other devices. Hopefully this subsides over time and fingerprints.
More seriously, clicking touchpad buttons is straight up frustrating. The touchpad looks great, and the material is nice. Akin to the Apple touchpad, there are no segregated buttons, and clickable areas are in the bottom right and bottom left. This sounds great, but the execution is poor (and perhaps can be improved with some driver tuning). Once you move your finger over to the bottom left to “click” you inevitably end up moving the cursor about a third of the time. If I do the tasks seperately, it works fine .. but when navigating normally, it’s a constant bother.
Performance
One small note about performance: coming from full-powered dual core machines, going to netbooks is an adjustment. One recommendation I ignored is splurging for the 2GB upgrade. I immediately regret that decision. Do it: buy the 2GB of RAM.
The wireless performance with the Interl (802.11n) adapter is really great, and better (in terms of -db readings) than with my 2 year old, full size Dell Inspiron.
If you do have 2GB of RAM, turn off the page file. I’ve noticed this is particularly great on laptops that crawl if the 5400RPM mini-drive trird to page a few hundred megabytes of stuff. I turned off the page file on my 1GB Mini. It’s noticably more responsive when switching between applications (Firefox, Messenger, and Microsoft Works, for now), but this puts an aggressive cap on the work that you can do simultaneously.
More to come!
Internet Literacy in Education
Wanted to share a pretty great video about internet media literacy, and higher education. For someone finishing up a Masters, some of the points he makes ring very loudly. From the YouTube video:
Recently Dr. Wesch spoke at the University of Manitoba where he explained the the basis of this video in a talk entitled, “Michael Wesch and the Future of Education.” I found it fascinating! He describes how he so naturally incorporates emerging technologies into his courses from the smallest seminar type class to the largest lecture theatre filled class.
More importantly he not only talks about the technologies but how he encourages extraordinary participation and collaboration from his students by engaging them in meaningful learning activities.
[...]
During his presentation, the Kansas State University professor breaks down his attempts to integrate Facebook, Netvibes, Diigo, Google Apps, Jott, Twitter, and other emerging technologies to create an education portal of the future.
An actually useful poster from the UPA
This has to be one of the most functional and relevant posters I’ve ever put up on a wall. It’s from the UPA (Usability Professionals Association) and it briefly goes over and organises the process of designing software for the user. I got one mailed to me when I joined the UPA as a free gift.
The poster is incredibly rich with information. It goes through analysis, field studies, creating user profiles, documenting requirements, designing, verifying with users, prototyping, implementation, heuristics, usability testing, and the rest of the steps.
The 11×17″ poster [PDF] is just as detailed as the full-sized one.
As found on mprove.de.
Lost in Transition
A lot of stuff has been happening in the last couple of weeks. For those in the know, I started a new job: Product Designer with Desire2Learn in Kitchener. I complain about the commute from Toronto, but really I’m just fighting the idea of embracing something new. So far, the office has been great: receptive, interesting, and the training program is keeping me busy.
To help me with this commute, I bought a new vehicle, a Jeep Grand Cherokee. I did this the last time I got a new job as well – it’s becoming a bit of tradition. So far I’ve been extremely happy with the new truck! Overthinking a purchase ruins the magic; I still managed to get a great deal, didn’t have to take out any new loans, and feel pretty gangsta’ driving real slow.
Ode to Guelph
With this new job, a new car, a new wake-up time, and being on the verge of finishing my thesis, the life of last summer seems like a distant memory. Even the close relationships I had are changing, or in some cases, ending.
Guelph felt like home for a little while. Living on Waterloo Avenue, stumbling distance from the all-too-convenient downtown, with 6 other amazing people really helped me redefine my social existence. If you’ve never lived with a bunch of guys in their mid-20’s without full-time jobs and a penchant for life, love, and liquor, I highly recommend it. But expect to have something go terribly, terribly wrong at least once.
Anyways, I guess this is my eulogy to the student life. It’s been a blast, the parties were fun, the girls were pretty, the readings were interesting … but it’s time to move on to different things. Wish me luck!
First draft of my thesis, done! Kinda.
So as many of you know, I’ve been trying to get my Master’s thesis done soon so I can graduate this May. Today I reached a bit of a milestone: the first draft. It’s not all I want it to be: it’s still missing a few figures, mostly screenshots to explain what’s going on. That’s funny because the thesis is partly about how difficult it is to comprehensively describe pictures. But I wanted to fire something reasonable off to my advisor so he can start editing it / tearing it to pieces.
If you’re interested, you can download it here [PDF, 4MB]. Only 58 pages 1.25 spacing. Booyah.
The dude even looks like me :(
Broken Alt-Tab and Web Applications
One thing that has recently become a problem for me is the loss of usefulness of Alt-Tab. For those of you who don’t know, Alt-Tab in the Windows world and beyond is the shortcut to quickly switch your active application (task switch). But what happens when I can’t switch to my active applications, because they’re buried in my web browser?
The Problem – It’s not uncommon for someone who does real work with the corporate intranet to have several tabs open within their web browser with data sources, and a webmail tab. Add to that desktop applications like Microsoft Excel, and an instant messaging client, and we have broken workflow in Alt-Tab.
This effect will become more pronounced as more and more applications that we use daily sneak into the web browser – unless we launch everything from Adobe Air or Gears shortcuts on the desktop. That is not the case, since I’m much more likely to get to Google Calendar by clicking an Add this GCal link, than I am to launch it from my desktop.
User Solution – If the user wants to correct this workflow problem, they can open all of their working tabs as new windows. The major issue with that is pre-loading the cognition of the task. Odds are the user navigated to their document in an exploratory way, and didn’t precede that activity with the thought “I better open this in a new window just in case I find something I need to task-switch to.”
Last I checked (Firefox 3.0.8), there is no easy way to turn a tab into a new window in Firefox. At least not without the Tab Mix Plus! add-on (via How-To Geek). Though I understand “tab tearing” will be included in Firefox 3.1, and is already a standard feature in Google Chrome and Safari 4 (video link).
Potential Solution - The major web browsers that support tabs already support quickly rotating through the tabs using Ctrl-Tab. Integrating the tab switching functionality (including preview screenshots, tab titles, and all of that) into Alt-Tab would be good. The specific details of how that would look, feel, and interact would make a great little M.Sc. topic. :-)
As a side note: The default built-in Alt-Tab application in Windows XP is fine (Vista Flip is even nicer), but there are a handful of better free replacements: one from the Microsoft PowerToys team, and an even richer one from Alex Avdonin.
Don Mills Road at Earth Hour
Don Mills Road, Earth Hour at OSC. Originally uploaded by grabka dot org.
We went to the Ontario Science Centre for Earth Hour; lots of fun, free hot chocolate, $1 popcorn, instructions for star-gazing, and some passionate African drumming.
I guess nobody told the apartments across the street to turn their lights off for that hour as well. It was really unfortunate, but made for an interesting contrast.
Earth Hour @ the Ontario Science Centre
To anyone who is looking for something to do on Saturday afternoon, it’s Earth Hour (shut off everything electronic for an hour, @ 8:30pm). The Ontario Science Centre is running a bit of an event.
The Google calendar event for the Toronto Activity Club (TACKY) calendar.
For anyone who’s interested, I’ll be there at 7:30pm!
Earth Hour at the OSC