It is with great sadness that I share the fact that there are now more Dell computers in our house than HP computers; but I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity I had over the weekend. I was able to pick up a brand new Dell Mini 1012 for a good price. I’ve been wanting a netbook to carry around for quite a while; but just hadn’t found the right one for the right price.
I bought the Mini at a local computer show, so, of course it’s not just the standard Dell 1012. They upgraded it to include a 250 gig hard drive, an extra gig of RAM, a battery upgrade, the full version of MS Office 2007 and Windows 7 Home Premium (instead of the piece of junk that is Windows 7 Starter).
I have only played with it a little bit so far, but I have been really happy with it. The display on this thing is unreal. Honestly, the color and clarity of the netbook display puts even my 15″ MacBook Pro to shame.
The first thing I had to do, though, was to update the Synaptics Touchpad driver (actually, I had to install a driver for it, as the upgrade to Win7 HP wiped out the original driver, leaving the standard Windows PS/2 mouse driver, instead). From what I was able to find out online, though, the Touchpad driver that comes with the 1012 is pretty lame (the main complaint is that there’s no scrollwheel emulation). With the new Touchpad driver, I now have multitouch support on the touchpad, but it seems a bit buggy (if you don’t scroll just right with two fingers, it jumps all the way to the top or bottom of the page).
I am really looking forward to carrying this thing with me when I go out of town, have minor work to do away from home, etc.