Audrey got me a Mac Mini Intel Core Duo last weekend. No special occasion, she’s just sweet like that. After doing the initial setup and running a few apps, I noticed that it was slow as hell with the included (and paltry) 512MB of RAM. The graphics system takes up 64MB, which doesn’t leave much for the OS and apps. after opening a few, I got the spinning beach ball pretty often.
I wanted to upgrade the RAM, but didn’t have time for the operation until today. I picked up 2 512MB DIMMS and a putty knife. I was a little nervous, but always look forward to the fun of cracking open a new computer to examine all the cool new things. It was a tremendous pain in the ass. I was getting a little worried about the putty knife technique, so I gave the ethernet wire technique, which I abandoned after about 10 minutes of trying to loop the wire around the tabs. I went back to the putty knife with the help of a nice instructional and very geeky video. After about 15 minutes of trying my best not to break the Mini, I got it open. The Mini was PACKED. It’s pretty crazy how they get everything in that tiny enclosure. I upgraded the RAM to 1GB of RAM. I’m not using it as my main computer, so I didn’t want to spend the extra money on 2GB of RAM.
The additional RAM made a world of difference and it’s now a pretty fast little machine. It’s gonna be a media and file server for the house. I may end up installing a mail server on it in the not-to-distant future as well.
