Dell Inspiron Mini 9 Unboxing

I’m a wee bit behind on my posts and can’t believe it’s taken me this long to publish this post which I started on 30.Nov.08.

Julie was due for an upgrade on her personal computing power. As I reached the checkout on Dell.com for her rather snazzy new Dell Studio 1537 (in lime green!), I was offered the opportunity to add a Dell Inspiron Mini 910 netbook to my order.  “How much you pay?”, I asked.  “$173.85 with shipping & handling”, sez Michael Dell and crew.  Sold!  Here’s what came in the cutest little box ever:

• Intel Atom N270 CPU (1.6GHz w/ 512k L2 cache)
• 1GB DDR2 RAM
• 8.9″ Wide Screen WSVGA TL monitor
• 8GB Solid State Drive
• Ubuntu Linux

Make no mistake, this is not your son’s gaming power house PC.  But it runs Ubuntu real nice, goes for hours unplugged, comes with Star Office out-of-the-box and boots up in 42 sec.  Really.  It does.  Honest.  With WiFi, a 10/100 Ethernet NIC, 3 x USB ports and a 15-pin VGA video output, it’s got the basics covered. It is sort of hard for me to touch type on, so I pretty much peck type when I use it during the occassional Saturday morning outing to Starbucks.  My kids like to steal it and check on their Webkinz.  Other than that, I haven’t found too many uses for it.  I think I need to be more purposeful in taking it with me when I run random errands.  If you’ve got ideas on how to use it more, I’m all ears.

So, without further ado, here are the unboxing pics. Enjoy!

Da Box

Da Packing

Da Gadget

CanoScan 8800F

The latest gadget in my geek arsenal is a Canon CanoScan 8800F film and negative scanner. If your family is like mine, there was probably at least one shutterbug. In my case, it was my father Dennis. He was always lugging around his Pentax 35mm SLR snapping shots of family, friends and whatever else was in the way. Slides were his favorite film development format; he’s easily got a couple thousand slides in his basement.

With a family reunion coming up this 4th of July (hosted by yours truly), Julie and I thought it might be a good time to start converting celluloid to bits. So we shopped around and ended up choosing this model after reading rave reviews. Who had the best deal? Surprise!… Amazon.com. We placed our order and a couple days later it showed up at my front door.

I should have photographed the un-boxing because it came with an array of adapters for various film types and a bunch of software including a licensed copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 (I know… that’s one version old, but it was free so who’s complaining).

After 30 minutes and a couple CD-ROMs of installation activities, I was ready for a test drive. I found the instructions straight forward and the scanner really easy to use. This particular scanner has a special lid with a light in it so the film is back lit when scanned and it seems to help a lot as I was impressed by the quality of the scanned images, even at the lowest res 300 dpi.

For instance, the one on the left of my grandparents Fred and Dottie was taken Christmas 1970. While a little dark, it was shot indoors without a strobe. I have done no color correction or touch up; this is how it came off the scanner… not bad IMHO. Some others that were taken outdoors are really fantastic.

The only thing flaky is the ArcSoft PhotoStudio 5.5 software that’s used to drive the scanner. It likes to crash about every other batch of slides (the scanner can do 4 slides at a time). Other than that, pretty slick and fast.

I’ve been working my way through a couple carousels of slides I took in high school and a handful of slides from another collection. The mother lode of my Dad’s collection is a future endeavor. I’m thinking some old photos might inspire some blog posts down the road, so keep an eye out for them.

If you’re in the market for a film scanner, you might want to give this one a try.