My new keyboard got here yesterday and I installed it without much trouble. This mini is far easier to upgrade than any laptop I’ve ever worked with — just unscrew two screws, lift the keyboard, pop a couple of little latches and unplug the cable and the old one’s out, then reverse the process and the new one’s in. The ribbon cable was a little hard to get lined up right, but I got it after a few tries.

The new keyboard is much, much better than the old one. The keys are offset like a standard keyboard, and the punctuation keys are in their normal places rather than shoehorned into odd corners or converted into function-key combinations. My typing speed is way up, even though the keys are slightly narrower. Here are pictures of the old and new keyboards together that someone posted to a forum; the topic includes instructions on how to get and install the keyboard.

I’ve also been delving more into Linux. Like I said a few posts ago, it’s a lot easier than it was in the past — however, all the geeky stuff is still there under the hood, ready to be poked and prodded and reconfigured. More on that later.

My 2GB memory module arrived today (thanks Joanie!) and I installed it in all of two minutes, one of which was spent finding the right screwdriver. This machine is incredibly easy to upgrade. The keyboard will be nearly as easy to replace as the memory, though there’s a couple of persnickety little tabs I’m going to have to be careful with. The keyboard isn’t going to arrive until after Memorial day, though.

Oh, and I got VirtualBox installed without any of the finagling Michael had to do on his mini; Ubuntu 9.04 seems to have almost all the prerequisites installed already. Now I just need to figure out how to get a legal Windows CD and a drive that connects via USB– Dell makes good machines, but even they couldn’t squeeze a CD drive into this tiny box. It would have filled half the insides, even without the bigger power supply they’d have to put in.

Did I mention this thing doesn’t even have a hard drive? Well, technically it does; it’s just a solid-state one, like a USB stick. That means the machine doesn’t have to burn a lot of power spinning a stack of metal platters, which in turn means I get over four hours of battery life even with the dinky little four-cell 32WH battery Dell put into the machine. It also means there’s no need for a built-in fan, though I’m a little worried about the machine overheating and killing my battery (you do not want to get Lithium-ion batteries hot; leaving one in a car on a summer day can permanently destroy most of its capacity. For more on this see Battery University.) Ive taken to popping out the battery and running on AC only when I have a plug available; probably a bit paranoid, but I like this thing and you won’t be able to get batteries for it forever.

I sprung for the extra-big 16GB drive, which may sound small compared to normal drives, isn’t even a quarter full even with a full operating system, Open office, and a metric boatload of other programs. Put that in your cache and smoke it, Windows. If I ever start running out of space, there’s an SD card slot for more space, plus I can always use some of the metric boatload of USB sticks I’ve accumulated over the years.

And I guess I’m old, because I remember when it was totally awesome that you could get a hard drive with 20 whole megabytes on it! Like, you could never fill that up for years, man! It was the size of a brick, and weighed about the same as one too. Now a thousand times that much fits on a couple of chips, and seems like not very much room. The eighties were a long time ago, and we live in the future now.

You know that keyboard Dell told me was out of stock? Yeah, you guessed it, not really. I called their spare parts department (1-800-372-3355) and they found one in under five minutes. That is all.

A couple weeks ago, Michael Ellis clued me in on a nice little deal from Dell; through their Faculty/Staff/Student purchase program, they have great prices on their mini laptops, also known as netbooks. (If that link doesn’t work, go to www.dell.com/epp and choose Higher Education from the menu.)

Just for being part of WOU, you get a 7% discount at any time, though to take advantage of it you’ll need to create a dell login and give them your V-number to prove you’re really associated with WOU. They also have $50-off deals that come and go on various systems from week to week; if you don’t see the deal on the model you want, wait a few days and look again, and repeat until you do see it. Make sure you’re logged in with your dell account, or it might not show you the deals!

You can find their netbooks on this page. I got the Mini-9, and I’m happy with it except for the narrow keyboard which has several keys in odd places. The brand-new Mini-10v is almost the same price, but with a slightly wider screen and a more normal keyboard.

I’ll probably be posting more about this thing as the days go by.