Dell Mini 9 makes surprise reappearance on Dell's website
By Donald Melanson 
posted August 7th 2009 4:11PM
posted August 7th 2009 4:11PM
The official word from Dell may be that its Mini 9 netbook has hit "End of Life," but it looks like the company may have had a change of heart or (more likely) a surplus of excess stock, as the popular netbook has now made a surprise reappearance on its website. With a starting price of $299, however, it's not as cheap as some of the past deals we've seen, but you do still have your choice of quite a few configuration options, and a promised ship date of August 24th. So, if you've been holding off, you better get in now before they disappear, again.
[Thanks, Rob and Nathan]
[Thanks, Rob and Nathan]
I have a Dell Mini 9 for about 8 months now. It was dog slow with 1GB of RAM and running Windows XP that came with it. Formatted the 16GB SSD drive, bumped it up to 2GB for RAM for about $20, and put WIndows 7 Ultimate on it that I easily installed via a USB thumb drive.
Wow!! What a difference. Yeah, still the same knubby keyboard that I constantly fat finger, but the performance seemed like it doubled. Since I also have Windows 7 running on another Dell laptop that use to have Vista on it, I know that Win 7 has made a HUGE perforamnce increase. But no doubt the doubling of the RAM contributed, too.
Love my Mini with my built in web cam and ability to just go anywhere and be functional. Its almost disposable at this cost if it breaks or gets damaged. But I can definitely see the reason to go to a 10" simply because that extra inch on the keyboard might make it more usable.