quote:
Originally posted by: stebesplace
I tell ya what. In regards to your comments sam, and to favor the mini for a sec, with 512 and soon to be a gig with my 23" display, this is pretty damn peppy. Ohh and photoshop runs as quick if not quicker with a re-partitioned swap on this 4200 RPM drive than in my shuttle with a 40 gig 7200 seagate. It is faster, and more responsive, and the OSX is very nice.The lacking component is the vid card, so woop dee doo, too bad. I have to say with the exception of video, this thing is as fast as my 3 GHz shuttle with 1 gig of ram (p4) PC3200 9700pro. Thats all I have to say right now.
Whatever "peppy" may mean to you but 4200rpm drive over 7200rpm is a LOT of hot air, unless your 40 gig 7200rpm is not working properly. This MiniMac owner has 7200rpm external and states that 4200rpm is a "downside", even with 1gb of ram is only "happier" and does not become the speed demon that one were lead to think from some posts. Get real. Unfortunatly now at least this guy who wants performance out of Mini has MIni, Power supply and external HD, not a real mini set up, dont ya think? Apparently your "peppy" is not good enough, buddy.
Im sure you1.42 ghz CPU is as fast as 3.0p4 when you type masseges in this forum--no argument there.
(added 2/4/2005)
"Mike, Love your site, so I thought I would contribute to the community.
I found a mac mini 1.42ghz at J&R and put in a SimpleTech 1gb 2700 RAM stick. I would say that opening up the mini is a little more tricky than specified on websites you list. You really need a thin putty knife and you should sand down so you get a very thin tapered edge. The ideal tool would have a thickness of an Xacto knife blade because the space between the top housing and the bottom is quite tight. Replacing the RAM was easy once the mini was open. Closing up, it took me several tries to get it to snap together successfully.
The mini is beautiful, small, and quiet. The powerbrick is nearly half the size of the cpu. It's two downsides are the paltry RAM and the slow internal drive--4200RPM. I ran xbench comparing the internal drive and booting off of a firewire 400 drive with a cloned system from my powerbook:
1) Internal 80gb 4200 rpm (ST9808210A): 113.93
Disk test: 46.94
2) External Firewire WD Caviar 7200rpm 200Gb with 8mb cache (WDC WD20 00JB-00EVA0): 132.76
Disk test: 77.57
OSX, with its thousands of small system files, is happier with more RAM and faster hard drives. While it would be nice to have a faster internal hard drive, it is far cheaper to just hook up a big, fast external firewire drive to use as a boot.
Regards, Paul T. "
