Dell Inspiron Mini 9 tips, tricks, advice, warnings, etc?

I ordered an Inspiron Mini 9 about six weeks ago and, finally, it's being shipped and (God willing) should arrive on Monday. It's been an intensely frustrating wait, but seeing that it's actually on the way has rekindled much of the sticky man-child excitement I had when I first placed my order

Anyway, I'm really looking forward to working towards and achieving maximum use out of this wee netbook, and was hoping that some of you fine, generous and giving folk could help me out by suggesting good freeware, configuration tips, possible hardware upgrades (if any?) and usage tips.


I have so far put together the following batch of installers. Further suggestions are very welcome.

Media / Entertainment

VLC
MediaMonkey
Audacity
Acoustica Beatcraft


Anti-Virus / Anti-Spyware

Avast!
Spybot S&D
WinPatrol


If there's an existing thread that's identical to this, many apologies. Please post a link and I shall wander over and have a look

 

Media -> i'd kind of drop the mm. actually should you want to, i'd add klite mega codec pack if i were into multimedia. plus i think that foobar2000 is the best music player out there so...

entertainment -> i'd choose gnu go and probably some free mahjongg game...

internet -> miranda im w/ needed network plugins and other tools-like ones, firefox or opera (preferably even one of the usb stick prepared ones), thunderbird for e-mails (or web-based soft as it is with google's mail).

office -> open office 3.0... should googledocs and notepad be not enough also i'd add protext with led.

readers/viewers -> microsoft's lit reader, gsview, djvu viewer, foxit pdf reader, cdisplay, irfan view...

pseudo-hardware -> virtual clone drive, pdf printer eg from bullzip software.

tools -> 7zip archiver

 

six weeks, is this normal to get this machine?

 

Six weeks!? I sure hope not, I configured a Studio 15 for a friend last week and tacked my Mini 9 on that for $99 (sweet deal). Not sure I can make it through the holiday season waiting for my M9 to show up

To the OP, I realize this is controversial but if you know what you are doing, I'd consider disabling any real-time background virus/spyware scanners. If you're careful about what you d/l, use a secure browser like FF and don't click on every popup you see, then you should be alright running nightly or weekly AV/spyware scans instead of real-time, thus saving some CPU/memory resources which are all to few on a netbook.

To add to the list, FF + AdBlock plugin + IETab plugin is a must for me, especially on a machine like the Mini 9 which is built for surfing. Maybe Google Chrome for it's awesome minimalistic interface that is perfect for the M9, though these days, I want to stab my eyes out anytime I have to surf the web without Adblock+ (banner ads, DO NOT WANT!)

Jay

 

Check out...

http://www.mydellmini.com/forum/

 

jlee123 - you forgot NoScript for the FF

plus if they manage to do it quickly, new ff might soon be even better (everyone i hope knows of "new" modzilla product that's blazing fast )...