The New Dell Inspirion Mini 9 may well become my best friend. I noticed today that Dell is previewing their new line of Mini Notebook computers and they are impressive. The Dell Inspirion Mini 9 is Dell's entry into the mini notebook market at a very low price point: $349.

"I think it would be a great thing to educate people on, though: If you're installing something new, make sure you remove the old stuff first."

'Nuff said.

I have been using Vista for well over a year now (since Beta 1). Of course Vista is slow, its bloated (over 10x the size of XP), aero kills system performance (even though this should be done on the video card), networking is pathetically slow, etc etc. We all know Vista sucks.

But recently my blood has been set to a rolling boil by the fact that most of my games just don’t work in Vista. At all. Its so bad that out of spite I have decided to make a list of games that work better in Linux under Wine than in Vista. These are games that were originally written to run in Windows XP, are broken in Vista, but magically work in Linux.

Australian sales of mini-notebooks jumped a massive 398.4% in the second quarter of this year, compared with 12 months ago. It's clear evidence that consumers prefer mobile PCs, even when they come with a higher price tag than a desktop equivalent.

Every time I walk through an Office Depot, Best Buy, or any other store that sells computers and software, I hear sales people telling customers about how they also NEED to buy MS Office with their new computer. I get the impression that most people buy a computer simply to run MS Office thus turning their computer into a glorified typewriter.

I've identified strengths and weaknesses in my experience with MythTV and Vista MC but made no choices so here it is. In the end, though impressed with MythTV, I'm going to stick with Vista for a while. Like a magical Disney adventure, it's managed to capture my imagination with promises of easy, 24 hour connection to live sports information and internet radio.

It's taken me this long to share it, because shortly after I upgraded my Macs to Snow Leopard, all of my Macs and my HP scanner stopped talking to each other. My scanner still doesn't work with any of my Macs, but I am able to bring you this picture today thanks to the magic of Linux.

Open source is changing not just how companies make software, but how they sell it. Alfresco's Matt Asay explains the new sales cycle and the skills that today's software sales people need to close deals.

3K Computer is shipping a $300 ultra-mini PC notebook that runs "Genuine CE" Linux distribution from a 4GB SSD (solid-state disk). 3K's RazorBook 400-Mini-Notebook uses a 32-bit RISC-based processor from Chinese processor start-up Ingenic.