I and two of my brothers went to an other town to a Mac shop to buy a Mac mini.
He bought the top of the line 1.42 GHz with 80 GB HD, Bluetooth and Airport.
I bought more RAM, a one GB stick.
I got a putty knife from my brother. I switched off the mini, removed all the cables and then inserted the thin knife at the edge of one side. I had to try several times during five minutes or so but finally managed to remove the top, it was relatively easy.
I first grabbed a radiator with both hands which I think helps to remove statics.
The RAM stick was immediately accessible so I removed the hooks and carefully removed the RAM stick and put the 1 GB stick there, carefully. It’s impossible to do wrong because there’s a “bump” which makes the RAM stick only fit in one direction. I pressed gently and put the hooks back.
The difficult part was to put the top back on but I later discovered I had to put the side with the ports together first and then the rest.
I can’t say I notice much difference in speed in giving it 512 MB more RAM and there’s constantly more than 500 MB free when I’m using it, but there’s now almost twice as many vnodes so that OS X can store even more files in a memory cache which makes my Mac slightly faster over all I suppose.
Nice. I heard somewhere that the sweet spot for OS X is 512mb. Anything after that, and it will only be noticed by people who use memory intensive apps. Did you see any obvious way to access the HDD? That’s probably the second most popular thing to change on PCs (The Mac Mini is a Personal Computer).
It’s a good thing you touched the radiator. If you didn’t, and you had some static built up, then touching the HDD means bye-bye data.
Many neophyte OS X users use file sharing apps like Acquisition or Limewire. Those apps will chew up all available RAM and beg for more. Meanwhile, users will expect performance from all their other apps. I encourage anyone to buy all RAM they can afford. There is no sweet spot. The more the better.
Nice. I heard somewhere that the sweet spot for OS X is 512mb. Anything after that, and it will only be noticed by people who use memory intensive apps.
Yes, I’ve never tested Mac OS X on anything less than 384 MB but it seems to be so.
The only big reason I upgraded was Reason, pun intended. The soft-synth studio.
Did you see any obvious way to access the HDD? That’s probably the second most popular thing to change on PCs (The Mac Mini is a Personal Computer).
No, but I guess I’d have to remove the Superdrive for that.
I was actually grateful that it was so easy to access the RAM-stick, I don’t like playing with the circuits, it’s too easy to break something. Oooh how careful I was.
It’s a good thing you touched the radiator. If you didn’t, and you had some static built up, then touching the HDD means bye-bye data.
The price difference is not exactly “huge” and I don’t like tinkering with the hardware unless I *have* to. My time is worth something too and these La Cie harddrives both look good and work perfectly together with the Mac mini.
I think it’s a bad idea to replace the internal HD with something bigger and faster because of the special requirements in the laptop-like innards.
It took me maybe five minutes to put an internal drive in an enclosure, and the some odd $70-80 I saved was well worth the effort.
All you do is unscrew the enclosure, open it, slap in your internal drive, hook up the connectors (which won’t go in wrong, and would be obvious even to an imbicile what connectors go where), secure the internal drive, close and screw up the enclosure. Now that I think about it I don’t even think it took me five minutes.
No need to know about jumpers, masters slaves and cable selects, obscene securing schemes that try to make servicing a computer easier/
(which won’t go in wrong, and would be obvious even to an imbicile what connectors go where)
I dunno… my mom and my sister don’t seem to be able to hook stuff up very often. About all they can do is find a free USB port, anything more complicated than that means I have to get up from whatever I was doing…
(which won’t go in wrong, and would be obvious even to an imbicile what connectors go where)
I dunno… my mom and my sister don’t seem to be able to hook stuff up very often. About all they can do is find a free USB port, anything more complicated than that means I have to get up from whatever I was doing…
The enclosure should be really easy, there are only two connectors, a big wide one with a shitload of pins and a smaller one with four pins.
(which won’t go in wrong, and would be obvious even to an imbicile what connectors go where)
I dunno… my mom and my sister don’t seem to be able to hook stuff up very often. About all they can do is find a free USB port, anything more complicated than that means I have to get up from whatever I was doing…
The enclosure should be really easy, there are only two connectors, a big wide one with a shitload of pins and a smaller one with four pins.
Well, I’m sure it’s a piece of caramel cheesecake to hook together, but they don’t really take the time to actually look and see what there is to do. Like, setting the beige G3 up in the office isn’t particularly hard, you just have to connect the right plugs into the right ports and you’re basically done. It’s not like you have to crack open the printer and fix the print head or something.
