[mjk12]

Last March, I got my wife the Dell Mini 9 for her birthday and I have used it on rare occasion. It came with XP. I found the start up time to be slow and the performance to be sluggish. Functional for my wife for note taking, web surfing, and emails, though.

With the $200 special on the Vostro, my wife got me that for Christmas. It came with Ubantu, which I used for a few days. Really, I thought Ubantu was an improvement. The start-up time was faster and the applications ran about normal speed to me.

I followed the guide on here, got Snow Leopard, and used the USB install. Wow. What an improvement in performance. Start-up time is fast and applications are fast. I wish I could install this OS on my laptop.

If you are dissatisfied with XP, you might want to take a look at Snow Leopard.

[WolfKeeper]

And Windows 7 boots even faster, although on SSDs it's a close race between 7 and OS X.

On my Mini 10v, Windows 7 boots about 20 seconds faster than OS X using a 5400rpm mechanical drive.

[chewy]

this was my experience, too. I was surprised that the version of ubuntu that the mini 9 shipped with was so slow and buggy. leopard, and now snow leopard, are fast and reliable.

XP on a mini 10v I found to be quite slow, and SL on this machine a BIG improvement, except for the slow boot up time.