Addendum to Mac Mini piece

[andychannelle]

Just thought I'd let you know, as we discussed it earlier and it was also featured in the mag, I finally got round to upgrading the memory in my Mac Mini. Pulling it to bits was quite easy with a very thin wallpaper scraper and the 256MB stick inside was better than expected (DDR400 rather than 333). I snapped in a 512MB stick and then put the spare 256 one in my desktop PC. Works a treat. I figure that once 1GB memory gets a bit cheaper, I'll swap it out again and add the 512 to my desktop (it has three slots) meaning both machines will have 1GB. Smart.

AndyC

[Andy]

Andy,

Do you reckon that most Mac mini's come with DDR400 memory? I know that there is some discrepancy between hard drives, with the 1.25 shipping with a 5400rpm drive against the 1.42's 4200rpm drive.

I'm still tinkering with mine at the moment, tried out FC4T3 which seems to work flawlessly, although I've now switched to a dual boot of Ubuntu and Mac OS X.

For those of you who are considering purchasing a Mac mini then go for it. It's almost un-nerving how quiet it is - I'm glad it has the solitary white LED on the front to reassure me that it is actually on and working!

AndyH

[andychannelle]

"Do you reckon that most Mac mini's come with DDR400 memory?" I've seen one other Mini opened up and it did have DDR400. I read one report where someone got a 75 per cent improvement on HD performance by geting an old drive, shoving it in a FireWire enclosure and plugging it into the Mini.

AndyC

[MOR]

Well it has been a long time since I have been on here, but I can confirm that there is a speed difference using an external 7200 Maxtor 250GB drive with a 16mb cache in a firewire 400 enclosure, I wouldn't say it is 75% overall though. Although this is about right for the disk speed access times alone.

On this subject you may want to look at these rather desirable enclosures and drives:

minimate
mini partner

And Belkin's rather nice USB hub (due out July)

Although I have had a mini mate on order since the beginning of May and no sign of it yet.