I just bought my first Mac

U

unixadm

Gawd
Joined
Jun 13, 2002
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Well I don't know what I'm thinking, but it was sort of an impulse buy. I ordered a Mac Mini Core Duo last night from Amazon. I picked up the Logitech S530 cordless desktop and 2gb of G.Skill memory for it.

I'll most likely swap the processor out for a T2600 Yonah and install a Seagate Momentus 100gb 7200rpm drive. I also ordered the miniStack V2 so that I can install a 400 or 500gb drive in it.

I went to Fry's Electronics last night and spent about 45 minutes trying out OS X and liked it. Mind you I had no idea what I was doing, but since I'm a Unix administrator with over 10 years of experience I figured I can't really be doing anything that wrong.:)

Wish me luck. I hope to have the Mini and memory by Wednesday and the miniStack V2 by late in the week.
 
The mini is killer. Too bad about the lame graphics card in it (the only thing preventing me from getting one).
 
Congrats! I got my first Powerbook back in November and it's been a pleasant experience so far. I think you'll enjoy the Tiger operating system and the iLife suite., and of course the ease of use.
 
Good job :). I'm sure you'll enjoy this machine, and it has almost limitless mod possibilities when it reaches the end of it's life (think CarPC etc.)
 
I didn't know that you could swap out the cpu in the mini. That's very interesting. Is it just regular a regular 775 slot?
 
alphaone said:
I didn't know that you could swap out the cpu in the mini. That's very interesting. Is it just regular a regular 775 slot?
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I'm pretty sure it is. I know that people have not only upgraded to faster Core Duos, but people with engineering samples have dropped in Core 2 Duo chips and they've worked properly!

You do have to "dig" through the Mac mini to get to the processor (you have to remove the outer shell, then the optical and hard drives), but it's an interesting option if CPU speed is the most important factor.
 
Sick man, congrats!

When I first tried OS X 10.3 I was like 'This is cool', I liked it, didn't know much about it, but like you, figured I could learn it no sweat!
 
The mini is just the gateway drug... you'll have a new mac in no time..
 
congrats :)

out of curiosity, why did you get the duo model if you're going to be upgrading the processor, memory and hard drive? easy enough to swap the optical drive while you're at it IMO
 
Aurelius said:
I'm pretty sure it is. I know that people have not only upgraded to faster Core Duos, but people with engineering samples have dropped in Core 2 Duo chips and they've worked properly!

You do have to "dig" through the Mac mini to get to the processor (you have to remove the outer shell, then the optical and hard drives), but it's an interesting option if CPU speed is the most important factor.
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Core Duos are on Socket 478, not 775.

Edit: *Mobile* Core 2 Duos use 478 as well.
 
Thanks everyone. I got the Mac Mini yesterday from Amazon and spent a few hours using it. I'm liking it - not sure if I'm sold on it yet, but it's pretty nice. I'll have my Logitech keyboard/mouse and 2gb of memory today.

The reason I went with a Duo is that it already came with the Superdrive and the resale on the Core-Duo processor is a bit better than the Core-Solo. I didn't plan to upgrade the processor right away as I'm not sure this is for me. If things work out, then I'll upgrade the processor and install a 750gb Seagate SATA drive using an SATA extension cable and a matching external enclosure. It won't be a quick connect thing, but then again I don't move my systems around very often.

Right now the performance is a big slow and I think that has to do with the 5400rpm drive and the 512mb ram. I'll post again after I get the upgrades installed and see how that changes things.
 
unixadm said:
Right now the performance is a big slow and I think that has to do with the 5400rpm drive and the 512mb ram. I'll post again after I get the upgrades installed and see how that changes things.
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When I first got my macbook it had the stock 512MB of ram. It was sloooow, it felt only slightly faster than my 4 year old powermac G4. When I upgraded to 2GB it felt like a completely different computer. OS X is a ram hog.
 
I did try to upgrade the machine to 2gb last night. However I'm not sure what happened but now one of the ram slots is dead. I'm no newbie here and extracted the SODIMMS very gently. So I'm going to RMA it back to Amazon and get another one. Even with 1gb it helped quite a bit with the speed. I think an external SATA drive hacked in with an extension cable and 2gb of memory will make this little machine perform pretty well. Add a 2.16 Merom and it will be flying (except the graphics).
 
Well I'm sending the Mini back and will have to do some thinking.

My buddy at work bought a iMac Core Duo 20", 250gb, 256mb Video Memory and 2gb of memory. His wife does not know he bought it a while back, so he's been keeping it in his cube. He's loaned it to me for a few days to try out. I'm installing WinXP using Bootcamp right now just to see how that works.

The iMac is MUCH faster than the Mini. It works very nicely and the screen is nice except it has really bad backlight bleeding. Under normal conditions it looks fine, but on an all black screen.. wow it's bad.

So I may look at an Imac instead. If it runs XP nicely to give me that flexibility, I may bite the bullet and plop down the $1800 w/ tax.
 
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