Dell Vostro A90 + Mac OS X = A great Mac netbook

Oscar Sodani is a founder of Help2Go and owner of Help2Go Networks, an IT consulting firm in the Washington D.C. area. Oscar holds the CISSP certification as well as industry certifications from Microsoft, Cisco and Novell.

I received my new Vostro A90 netbook yesterday and proceeded to go through the instructions posted on the MyDellMini forum site. Since the Vostro has the same internals as the Dell Mini 9, the OS X instructions for the Mini 9 are supposed to work perfectly for the Vostro as well.

I have the stock Vostro A90, with 1GB of RAM and a 16 GB SSD drive. My recommendation is that those are the minimum specs needed to install and run OS X. Even with 1GB of RAM, the system runs great, but I do plan onbuying a 2GB RAM module - after all, they're only $25 or so. It's a hassle to install Leopard on a SSD drive with a capacity less than 16GB. There are instructions for it, but I see no reason not to just buy the 16GB version.

I don't have an external DVD drive, so I used the 2 USB drive instructions. I always have plenty of USB drives around - I find that they prove themselves to be invaluable time and time again. 

The instructions are straight forward and well-done. Within a couple of hours, I was able to format the USB drives as directed and install OS X on my Dell Vostro.

My impressions of the netbook are that it is about exactly what I expected. The keyboard is small, the trackpad is small, the screen is small. But it is entirely usable, and the netbook is as small and light as anything I have ever used (and I used to own a Sony Vaio Picturebook!)

Leopard itself runs very well and boots up off the SSD in seconds. I'm mainly going to use it for Firefox, which runs well, though I imagine it's going to be a much happier piece of software when I upgrade to 2GB or RAM. Safari, on the other hand, is as snappy as can be.

All the hardware just works - Wifi, Bluetooth, the camera, sound. By going through the instruictions, it loaded every driver I might need and I had to do ZERO configuration.

I have wanted a netbook for some time, both as something I can carry around with me to client sites, but also as a kitchen counter computer. However, I dreaded the idea of having another Windows PC to administer. Frankly, I'm quite sick of the anti-virus/anti-malware/Windows Update carousel that owning a WIndows machine entails. Installing a fresh copy of Leopard ($129 in the Apple store) onto this machine has given me the best of both worlds.

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