Adventures with Dr. Lady Cutie Troublemaker

My delightfully hack-o-rific boyfriend has done something fairly remarkable in the past week. (Cut to his hack if you don’t feel like being bored by the back story!) It all began when I purchased a Dell Mini 9 laptop/netbook. I have a rule: when I get paid for photography, I get to buy a new lens, or something that helps me to make more money, but it can be fun, too. Well, I got another photography job, and I was thinking about lenses I could buy, but the truth is that I’m pretty happy with the lenses I have right now. There aren’t many limitations I’m finding I have, and honestly, the more lenses one owns, the more stress there is about deciding which lens to have when I walk out the door. When it all comes down to it, I have the 50mm, f/1.8 planted on the front of my camera 90% of the time. That way, I can just throw the sucker in my purse, and I’m a happy camper.

Anyway, I started thinking about what fun gadgety thing I could get that would help me be more productive as a psychologist, and quickly came up with the idea of getting a little netbook, one that could bring around with me that was NOT a place where I could edit pictures. Basically, a machine for report writing, checking email, and that’s about it. After a little research, and after learning that Dell Mini 9’s were about to go on sale at Best Buy, my choice was clear.

Well, I got this little sucker, and it’s EXCELLENT! It fits right into my regular purse. I have it running Windows XP with only a few little programs installed:

• MS Word and MS Excel
• Chrome, Firefox Portable, and Safari 4 Beta (I’m at a crossroads browser-wise these days)
• CCleaner (my very favorite security program)
• Foxit PDF Reader
• Lightscreen Portable
• WinDirStat Portable (for making sure I’m wasting NO space on my tiny 8GB hard drive)
• Pidgin Portable for IMing (hey, I’m not a saint!)
• CoolPlayer+ Portable (for listening to tunes)
• Picasa (for viewing, and now when I’m out, if I just HAVE to post a picture, I can)

Portable Apps

There’s a really nice SD card slot, which is great for sucking in pictures, and I found a $30 16GB Kingston card which I keep crammed in there most of the time. A few of the portables are there, plus I will eventually add a little more music and such.

I signed up for a Dropbox account, which is REALLY nice. I just drop stuff into “My Dropbox” and it automatically syncs with the server, so sharing files I’m working on between computers is a no brainer. I’m a happy camper, and I think it’s one of the best $300 I’ve ever spent.

So back to the delightfully hack-o-rific boyfriend… Multiple people saw that I’d gotten this thing and started sending me links to this Hackintosh article. Jake is a tech guy. This article had him drooling. He started getting MUCH more interested in my little Dell Mini 9 very quickly. He was so excited about it that by around Wednesday, I had offered to give him my Mini for the day on Saturday so he could try some hacking. And by around Thursday, he’d ordered his own netbook. It’s a Lenovo S10 – similar to mine, but with a different kind of hard drive with 160GB. His plan was to get a netbook as his primary laptop. Right now, he’s using his IBM-issued ThinkPad. With his own laptop, he could leave his work machine at work all the time.

On Saturday, Jake set up the Mac OSX on an extrernal hard drive and was running it on my Mini. Very neat. On Monday, he was out driving around in the snow to try and get his paws on his new netbook. Sadly, it was already out on the truck. But yesterday evening, he got that sucker, and he’s been a bit distracted ever since.

Check out his handiwork. You’ll be impressed:
Mac OSX on Lenovo S10 and Dell Mini 9