What should I do with this Dell Vostro A90?

[Jaxidian]

So I have a spare Dell Vostro A90 netbook laying around and I want to put it to use but I really have no idea what to do with it. It has an Atom 1.6GHz CPU, 2GB RAM, a 16GB SSD hard drive, Bluetooth, no 3G, and an absolutely atrocious keyboard.

Any thoughts on how to put this thing to good/real use?

 

[LtKen]

Swap the hard drive for something huge and make it a Media Center PC.

 

[Jaxidian]

So a couple ideas:

1. Hackintosh - The Mini 9 is practically the same netbook, just different plastic on the outside. I finally gave up on this because, to get this to work, you essentially need to have a Mac to assist and I have none available.
2. Chromium - I gave up because I don't want to get into compiling the source myself and deploying it that way. I wish they just had compiled builds that they've formed into ISOs for me to download or something.

I'm definitely open to suggestions, though!

 

[Jaxidian]

Swap the hard drive for something huge and make it a Media Center PC.

No go. First of all, the CPU sucks too much (it can't really even handle Hulu). Secondly, this doesn't take a standard 2.5" hard drive - it takes a 50mm mini PCI-e PATA SSD drive only. Or in other words, a 64GB drive is $100 and a 128GB drive is $200+. There's no such thing as a huge drive for this thing unless I went USB external, which that would be pretty much worthless.

 

[LtKen]

Why would it be worthless? I have an ancient crappy PC I use to host media all over my house, no problems -- I'm certain that machine is faster. OK....

 

[Jaxidian]

Well, I do already have a dedicated HTPC (dual-core) and file server (7TB). So relatively speaking, it would be worthless. ;-)

 

[JCo352]

I'll take it.

 

[Jaxidian]

I'll take it.

I was planning on tossing it on eBay if I couldn't find a good reason to keep it. We could arrange that... ;-)

 

[JCo352]

You have a Droid X?

 

[Jaxidian]

You have a Droid X?

Not yet. Unless I get convinced otherwise in the next 2 weeks, I will, though. And more and more research into it is giving me reason to consider it (locked bootloader is the #1 culprit of them all, though).

 

[JCo352]

You have a Droid X?

Not yet. Unless I get convinced otherwise in the next 2 weeks, I will, though. And more and more research into it is giving me reason to consider it (locked bootloader is the #1 culprit of them all, though).

Yea, I thought about getting it, but I think I might get the Droid Pro when it comes out, or maybe even something made by HTC. You still rockin' the G1?

 

[Jaxidian]

You have a Droid X?

Not yet. Unless I get convinced otherwise in the next 2 weeks, I will, though. And more and more research into it is giving me reason to consider it (locked bootloader is the #1 culprit of them all, though).

Yea, I thought about getting it, but I think I might get the Droid Pro when it comes out, or maybe even something made by HTC. You still rockin' the G1?

Yup, still going with the G1. The 2 main issues with it are 1) T-Mobile and 2) Severely CPU-limited. It seems that the thing crawls due to the CPU constantly being pegged. I run SetCPU and it makes a HUGE difference, but I just drool at the ability to have a 1GHz CPU that can run laps around this little CPU.

I can actually get by with the small screen due to the physical keyboard. I still claim that the G1 has had the best physical keyboard of any phone I've ever used or have even seen online! It makes it a synch to type emails while driving without having to look down! :redface:

Oh, and of course Cyanogenmod sure helps, too! ;-)

 

[JCo352]

Yea, I used to love my G1, and yes it does have the best physical keyboard. I used to use it ALL the time, now I never use the physical keyboard on my Droid.

 

[Jaxidian]

I might do that if I had a larger touchscreen but with the small screen I kinda don't have much choice. Although Swype isn't too bad on the small screen but another half inch even would make a huge difference for that.

 

[Jaxidian]

Well, right now I'm installing Windows 7 Pro to the A90.

Observation #1: Apparently it's not very happy with a 64-bit version.
Observation #2: Installing from a USB stick to a SSD hard drive is slower than I anticipated.
Observation #3: I may try the Chromium route again. I just stumbled across this.