I am not having a great morning, AND I have a computer question

[cupcake_goth]

ARgh, panic and chaos for one of the product teams I support. Nothing dire, but they are in a state of "OMG FLAIL WHY ISN'T THIS THING WORKING". That, combined with my network connectivity occasionally vanishing, meant that I had to spend a lot of time talking people off the ledge and waiting for tools to connect. Whee. Oh, and something went wonky in my building, and my office has been turned into a freezer. Good thing I have a lot of tea here.

So, computer question. I am contemplating purchasing one of those teeny-tiny netbook computers, because having a teeny-tiny Windows machine that I can use to connect to the corporate network and remote to my work desktop would be pretty awesome. But, I'm a Mac girl. (Yes, even tho' I work at That Other Place.) I am also spectacularly clueless when it comes to tweaking or fiddling with computers. Now, Gizmodo recently had a post about how to hack a Dell mini 9 into running OS X. (Clicky-link!). My question is this: would there be a way to, er, flip the netbook between running OSX and a Windows OS? Because that would make things perfect for me.

No flame-wars, please, about which OS is superior, or anything else like that. I need advice, not arguments.

Comments

[twilight2000.livejournal.com]

I've a number of friends who are running Mac Laptops with one of the several Windows emulators - and doing it for work (these are coding tester friends - who live on them to test, write code, reboot servers and the like) - which would probably be my approach if I were going to get a laptop (also a mac girl). Not as inexpensive as a mini-windows only box - but more useful to folks like me.

OTOH, if the Hackintosh trick actually works - sign me up! :>

[loree.livejournal.com]

tithonium has one of those eensy weensy Dells, too, and wants to do that. He's just waiting for re-employment so he can buy another drive for the machine "so if everything turns to crap I don't have to reinstall back to linux."

[ex-fashioni.livejournal.com]

Before you do anything, wait until the 24th of this month. There's a possibility-- kind of remote, but still-- that there might be an announcement of a Mac netbook.

[dporowski.livejournal.com]

Yes and no. If Boot Camp will work properly on the drive, you're set. Otherwise, I suspect it would be a gigantic pain in the ass.


You may have good luck with running a VM with your chosen flavor of Windows inside it(which is absolutely possible), but the netbooks aren't known for power, so your performance may suffer.

[tithonium.livejournal.com]

item the first: do NOT buy the mini 10. You didn't mention it, but I wanted to get that out first.

Item the second: I've got a mini9, name of Altair. Got it with ubuntu on it, and we're reasonably happy together. But, I saw the post about putting OSX on it and decided that, yes, this must be done. I want to do it on a clean drive, tho, so I can roll back easily if I decide I need to. So, I'm waiting until I can afford the $120 for a spare 32gb ssd.

IF you want to run osx AND windows, you'll want to get the biggest drive in it you can. I don't know what they're offering at the moment, but I'd say anything under 32gb will lead to the sad, and less than 64 will likely get tight. You can buy third party SSDs made to fit in the mini9, 32gb for $120 as I mentioned, and the 64s are rather horrible, around 3 or 4 hundred. Get it with windows, then do some terrible things to repartition it into a windows and an osx drive, and off you go into the blue. Or the green, depending which you boot into.
Another thought.. if you know someone who can get you a copy of windows dirt cheap, it might be a better option to buy the linux version. iirc, it saves about $100 on the price tag.


tl;dr: Dual booting shouldn't be a problem. But, buy as big a drive for it as you can, you'll want the space.

[corwynofamber.livejournal.com]

My guess, based on doing a search on the term "dual boot osx" is the answer yes, it is doable.
It might be a bit tricky unless you go with a model with the biggest SSD drive you can get or if the dell supports it a spinning drive.

[x-in-tenebris-x.livejournal.com]

You could install a double partition - I have one on my laptop and run Windows and Linux. I'm not sure if it works with Mac too but I guess it should.

[robespierrette.livejournal.com]

We have two of the mini-netbooks here at our house, one for James (a Dell), and one for Nora (an Asus Eee-PC). They both run just fine, and better yet, run on good ol' solid XP.

I'm a Mac person through and through, and I have never had trouble doing any basic computing stuff on the netbooks. There's a little bit of single-instead-of-double-clicking, and hunting around for menus, but there has been such a convergence in user interface that it really shouldn't be a deal-breaker.

It sounds like you would mostly be using it for work (XP being A-OK for that), and if most of the other stuff you want to do on it is Web-based (I'm guessing?), you'll really not notice a big difference - browsers being practically identical.

The big complaint I've heard from my family is that the keyboards are still a little bit overly-cramped (though in this regard the Dell is better than the Asus - different layout). But cheap, and little! :)

Your Computer Question

[purple-mark.livejournal.com]

I'm a Macbook user myself and you are probably more tech savy than I am, but if you could get
that to work that would be great!

[noisedesign.livejournal.com]

I have one of the eee-pc's with WinXP on it for a little machine to take with me to jobsites where I have to talk to Windows only sound hardware. The size is nice because it pretty much just lives in one of my toolkits and is there when I need it.

As for dual booting these machine with the hackintosh tricks, I looked into it and there are certainly models where it is possible and works, but it is not the most reliable thing. System updates often break the Mac side of the machine and it bad situations it can lead to a complete reformat and reinstall to get things up and running again. I wouldn't do it on any machine that I expected to use for real work. It would be fun to do on a hobby machine.

As for the tiny machines, of the ones I've played with I actually think I like the model that HP has out the best. The keyboard seems to be a bit better and it can usually be picked up at Costco pretty cheaply.

[zenkitty-714.livejournal.com]

I have a teeny-tiny eeePC that runs Linux. It's awesome. This information may not be helpful to you at all, however.