Madalyn got a new ‘netbook’ for her birthday yesterday – a Dell Inspiron Mini 9.  She bought it with her birthday money and money that she has been saving up.  It’s a really, really small notebook.  Here it is next to my laptop for a size comparison:

The Netbook

It’s tiny, and perfectly sized for 12 year old girl hands.  My hands, on the other hand, had considerable trouble typing on it while using it.  ‘.com’ would turn into ‘.cim’, with my fingers too fat to easily type on the small keyboard.  I’m sure with time I would get used to it.  I don’t think it would be workable for a note-taking device in college, as I’ve seen some people try.

It’s about as powerful as a ‘last generation’ laptop, and has the following:

It has no hard drive – it uses flash memory, like a smaller iPod.  Given all that I expected it to have more than a 4 hour battery life, but I’m not complaining too much.  $249 for this computer at sams club, it’s more than acceptable.

The Cleanup

What wasn’t so acceptable was the amount of garbage on the meager storage that this computer had.  A full Windows XP disc image of drivers, which would be useful if she were replacing components of the computer (not really possible), copies of other drivers, a full mccaffe internet security installation, Microsoft Works, Powerpoint 2007 Viewer, and so on…  Dell could have made my job easier by using a more updated windows installation and less cruft.

4 hours of updates, deinstallation of the assorted crud, and installation of smaller, better programs to handle her homework and entertainment needs, and she should be set to go.  Her first full day of usage is still upcoming – the poor girl had to spend hours looking at it sitting in its box at sams and then at lunch.

The She-Beastie

Of course, with her own computer comes more responsibility.  The first major difference is that previously, we had a computer in her room with which we had to log her in to meter out internet usage.  Being a fixed computer, we also had remote desktop viewing capabilities, so she and her brother knew that we would be able to ‘see’ what they were doing despite it being in a different room.

I could install a remote desktop application on the netbook, but we decided against it.  She’s going to need to develop her privacy, after all.  The netbook will sit on moms desk so that it doesn’t get used prior to homework or other obligations, much like the desktop comptuer is now.

She’s been taught fairly well about what to do and what not to do while online.  We’ll see how things go.