I had been on the lookout for a nice netbook since a couple of months, but I wanted something much more powerful than the cheap Atom powered ones which are commonly available now.

I had three options

Dell M101z
Asus EEE PC 1215T
MSI x340

After about a day of research, I decided to go with the Dell M101z. I ordered the base version of the Dell M101z (with Windows 7 Home Basic) for Rs 22265 on December 28, 2010 and it was shipped to me in about 15 days.

Dell M101z Specifications

Display: 11.6 inches, 1366 x 768 pixels
Processor: 1.7 GHz AMD Athlon II K125 Neo
RAM: 2 GB DDR3 RAM
Graphics: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4225
Hard Disk: 250 GB SATA, 5400 RPM
OS: Windows 7 Home Basic
Other Features: 3 USB ports, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth, HDMI, VGA, Mic, Headphone, Ethernet, 1.3 MP webcam
Battery: 6 cell 56 WHr Li-ion battery
Price: Rs 21,800 (Base) + Rs 465 (Windows 7 Home Basic)

I have been using it for about 2 weeks now, and finally have time to post a short review.

Dell M101z Review

Design

The Dell M101z has an excellent design with a glossy black look. The build quality is great and it is quite light and portable at just 1.56 kgs, despite having a 11.6 inch display. There is no flex near the keyboard or the display area and the chassis is very sturdy.

Display

The Dell M101z has a nice 11.6 inch display with a resolution of 1366 x 768 display. The resolution may seem a bit high for such a small display, but in time, you will get used to it. It’s perfect for watching movies. The brightness and contrast are great, but the viewing angles aren’t very great.

Keyboard and Touchpad

The Dell M101z has the best keyboard I’ve seen in any netbook. It has a chiclet style keyboard which is almost full-sized. The typing experience is awesome; I get a typing speed of about 65 WPM, slightly more than on my desktop. The arrow keys are a bit weirdly shaped though, but they hardly takes 2 mins to get used to. The touchpad is also very responsive and the mouse buttons below it are perfect.

Performance

The Dell M101z offers much better performance than standard netbooks. It is powered by a 1.7 GHz AMD Athlon II K125 Neo processor and comes with 2 GB DDR3 RAM and an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4225 graphics chipset. It has a 250 GB SATA, 5400 RPM hard drive. It comes with Windows 7 Starter but I upgraded it to Windows 7 Home Basic. It also has Ubuntu Light, an instant-on OS pre-installed.

The performance is very good. It is very fast once you remove the crapware that Dell bundles it with. Windows 7 boots in about 25-30 seconds. The processor is quite fast and the RAM is more than adequate for basic computing. I can easily play Counter Strike and Warcraft: DoTA, and many old games, without any issues. It’s perfect for watching movies, browsing the web, video conferencing, working on Office and some light programming. It handles 720p videos with ease. I get a Windows Experience Index score of 3.4 on my Dell m101z.

Other Features

The Dell M101z comes with 3 USB ports, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth, HDMI, VGA, Mic, Headphone, Ethernet, 1.3 MP webcam and a card reader. It is powered by a 6 cell 56 WHr Li-ion battery which lasts for about 5 hours with casual usage. Watching videos drains the battery in about 3.5 hours.

Should You Buy It?

Hell yeah! It is the best netbook I have used in ages and offers much more than a standard netbook. It is almost like a laptop, only much more portable, much cheaper and much more awesome. I would definitely recommend it.

If you are looking for a full-sized, desktop replacement notebook, I would suggest the Dell XPS 15. It is much more powerful than the Dell M101z and a bit more bulky.

Intel and Nokia had merged the Moblin and Maemo projects a while back to form MeeGo. It’s a new mobile OS which will work on both smartphones (ARM) and netbooks (X86 – Atom).

If you have a PC, laptop or netbook powered by the Intel Atom processor, you can install MeeGo on it.

You can check the list of supported hardware platforms here.

How to Install MeeGo on your Netbook / PC / Laptop

1. First of all, download the MeeGo image on your PC. Download any one of these two MeeGo images.

Download MeeGo v1.1 for Netbooks

Download MeeGo v1.1 for Netbooks (With Chrome)

Download Win32 Image Writer

2. Run the Win32 Disk Imager and select the MeeGo disk image you downloaded.

Also insert a USB drive in your PC, and select the USB drive in W32 Disk Imager. Write the MeeGo image to the USB drive.

3. Insert the USB drive into your netbook or laptop (Atom only) and boot from the USB drive.

4. You should see a Welcome to MeeGo screen.

Select Boot MeeGo if you want to try out the MeeGo OS before installing it.

You should see a MeeGo MyZone screen. You can now run MeeGo on your netbook or PC.

Select Installation Only if you want to install MeeGo on your PC, netbook or laptop.

Click next, select the language, select the partition you want to install MeeGo in, and select the Write Changes to Disk option next.

MeeGo should now be installed on your PC or netbook. You can now proceed with the initial setup.

via MeeGo

How to Install Ubuntu 10.04 on your Netbook

First of all, download UNE (Ubuntu Netbook Edition) from Ubuntu Netbook Edition Download

Next, download W32DiskImager and burn the Ubuntu image onto a USB drive.

After the bootable Ubuntu Netbook Edition image has been burnt successfully on the USB drive, insert the USB drive into your netbook and boot from it.

You can either boot from the live USB or install it on your netbook hard drive.

Link: Ubuntu

This tutorial will show you how to install Android 2.0 Eclair on your Asus EEE PC. It also works with most other netbooks.

Download the Android X86 port from http://www.android-x86.org/

-> Android-X86 Download Link

How to Install Android OS on your EEE PC?

After downloading the bootable android-x86 ISO, burn it to your USB drive using Win32DiskImager –  or UNetBootIn

Insert the USB drive in your netbook, set it to boot from USB drive from the BIOS options and then restart your netbook.

The installation process should start soon. You can use it as a Live USB to run Android without installing it or install Android to your harddisk.

If you choose to install it, select a partition to install it to and then format it using the EXT3 format. Choose to install the GRUB boot loader.

After the installation is complete, you can reboot your EEE PC to run the installed Android OS.

The OS is very responsive and works perfectly well, atleast with the EEE PC. Everything just works out of the box – Wi-Fi, Ethernet, Display, Mouse, Keyboard etc.

It can be used as a backup OS or just to show off a bit. It also has a makeshift version of the Android Market with a few apps compatible with the X86 platform.

Android is a free operating system for mobile phones developed by Google. I’ve always been a huge fan of it; most probably my next phone is going to be an Android. It is mostly run on smartphons powered by ARM chips, though it is being ported to various platforms and architectures, including X86.

LiveAndroid is a Live CD for Android running on X86 platforms. You can use it to run Android directly on your PC.

To Install Android on your PC,

Just download LiveAndroid

Live Android – Part 1
Live Android – Part 2

After downloading these files, just join them using HJSplit.

You can also download it via the LiveAndroid torrent.

Next, burn the ISO (disk image) to a CD using any CD burning application like Nero, Magic ISO, Power ISO etc.

You can also use W32DiskImager to copy the image to a USB drive.

After this step, just reboot your computer and boot from the CD or USB drive. You should be greeted by the LiveAndroid startup screen.

Alternatively, you can also load the ISO in any virtualization application like Microsoft Virtual PC or Virtual Box.

This is a tutorial to try Android as a Live option. To install Android on your EEE PC or netbook - How to Install Android OS on EEE PC