Yes, an upgrade to 2G is possible but unsupported.  As with all dell warranties, you may have an effect on your warranty were you to make such a replacement yourself.

 

Dell does not currently offer a 2G memory option.

 

I will have to look at the BIOS to figure out whether opening the memory aperture is possible but frankly why would you want to?  The video chipset doesnt have the feature support for active gaming, nor does the processor.

 

If you want a desktop replacement, the MIni 9 is not the model for you.  The mini 9 is targetted more as a child's productivity laptop or as a professional's web kiosk.  Documents over the web.  Email over the web.  Internet over the web.  Little to nothing stored / installed locally. 

 

A colleague at work has decked out a mini 9 with a removable hard drive, 2G RAM, and is trying to get his hands on the 32G version of the mini-PCIe SSD from STEC to replace the 16G that came with his laptop.  He used vLite to build out a vista image with the minimal neccessary components and then did a bare minimum install of Office 2007 to get just the base applications installed.   

 

It does ok.  We kind of collaborated on it because I have more experience with the internals paring down an install.  Its not the fastest platform in the world and you really do have to remove a lot.  

 

We used Ghost to capture a drive image first to make sure we could go back.  

 

We had to disable windows search completely because it always is looking at the disk and with an SSD thats not a desirable behavior, plus it was stealing cycles from the CPU. 

 

You really pare it down to minimal services, too.  Dont expect to use it for everything you would a desktop.  What we ended up with was not using the aero interface (got rid of it), media player was installed, the wireless stack was there.  We had to throw some important things overboard.  Like the DLL cache and system recovery files.  So we imaged the laptop again afterwards so that he could go back if something happened ebcause we trimmed the install down to the point that the recovery files werent there anymore. 

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@Clocks wrote:

 

A colleague at work has decked out a mini 9 with a removable hard drive, 2G RAM, and is trying to get his hands on the 32G version of the mini-PCIe SSD from STEC to replace the 16G that came with his laptop.  He used vLite to build out a vista image with the minimal neccessary components and then did a bare minimum install of Office 2007 to get just the base applications installed.   

 

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How does the laptop cope with Vista? Does it run at an acceptable speed?

Well thanks.  But i wasnt looking for a desktop replacement, more like a super pda.  I was hoping it would be able to run "EVE online"  Its an older game and dosnt demand much, but i'm not sure how well it would run in the mini 9.

 

its min sys req is

1.5gHz cpu

1024 mb ram

8 gig hd

128mb shader (g forse 6/ati x1300 or better)

direct x 9

 

 

the only spec that would be a issue would be the vid card.  but i'm really not sure how the one on the mini 9 stacks up. 

 

Also the min gams reolution is 1024x768,      Would that even work for the mini 9 screen? (1024x600)

On a related note, it looks like the onboard chip simply doesnt have the address space to support additional memory aperture, by the way.

http://www.intel.com/products/chipsets/gma950/index.htm

 

No, unfortunately the mini 9 uses a frankly odd screen size which is below neccessary minimums.  The two 'usual' types of widescreen are 16:9 and 16:10.

 

16:9 would have a Screen Height of 576 px

16:10 would have a Screen height of 640 px

 

So the laptop screen does not even fit nicely into the bracket of 'widescreen' displays.   

 

The video chip itself should be ok for Eve.  In fact, anecdotally I have found someone with an Intel GMA 950 that says it runs ok.  Only problem is a framerate drop with larger fleet engagements and particle effects.

 

Just the screen resolution is too small to play nice with many modern games.