Laptop got an early hands-on with Dell’s 12-inch Mini 12 netbook and found it to be a bit sluggish, with two-minute long boot times and four whole minutes before all the preloaded software got its act together. That’s fair, but I have no idea what Dell was thinking sending out a netbook with 1GB of RAM and Vista Home Basic, plus a pre-installed anti-virus program. I mean, what did they think was gonna happen?

Laptop says, “We’re curious to see if the system boots faster under Windows XP or another OS,” to which I say, “Yes, it does.” Aside from weird software decisions, the actual hardware angle looks like it fares better with a three pound weight even when using a six-cell battery, a 91% keyboard (although Laptop points out that it would have been nice for the keyboard to stretch all the way across the chassis), and less than an inch of thickness.

Still no actual ship date for the Mini 12 aside from mid-November. That’s soon, though!