colryn

So I got a Mini a couple weeks ago. It is so cute, compact and capable. Sounds preverted but true.

My problem is I am asking it to do more than it is capable of in stock form. Soooooooooooooooooooooooooooo, I just upgraded it this evening.

I just installed 4g of Ram and an extremely fast 7200rpm 320g HDD. Right now it is loading OS X 10.5. The upgrade was a little scary. I have never cracked open it before. After watching several youtube video of people doing so, I bit the bullet. It actually was quite easy.

I will give another review when it is finished and I can do a litttle testing

Geek

Interesting you mention this. A buddy of mine was upgrading the RAM in his wife's PowerPC Mini the other night. He had a bit of trouble getting the case apart because of the snaps but it ended up working out well. I was pretty surprised by the simplicity of the hardware inside. There really isn't a whole lot to it.

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Motorcycle fanatic?

sheepofblue

Just got a 1.83 so now they will be free to do a massive update

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Purpdust

Thanks I was hoping you would trigger an Update

sheepofblue

Guessed wrong it was not an update I triggered It was HD failure. I probably would have got a MacBook Pro had I known that my laptop HD was going to crap out 1 day later So now I got some Mini memory and other goodies coming PLUS a new laptop HD.

For those wondering it is 4 years old and has been used a bunch. Travel and couch duty. I was surfing and hit a page with a PDF and it went lala.... At first I figured reboot but it would just start go a bit like it was checking the drive and shutdown. I booted it via the system disk and it said the SMART diagnostics were failing. I rebooted again using Diskwarrior. I THINK I can recover most if not all via DiskWarrior when I get the replacement in.

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Purpdust

That is why we all use backup system, because Mechnical Devices WILL fail at some point in time.

ssg

That sucks on the HD sheep but that isn't too bad. Do you know who the OEM of the drive was (Hitachi per chance?). More importantly, are you going with a consumer grade SSD now?

A mini with XBMC sitting under my living room TV would be cool, but I got xbmc rolling on Ubuntu (ibex) and it works ok from my Lenovo T43 so I am probably going to stick that back there and just leave it alone. Until I feel the need to see more Apple white in my living room.

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sheepofblue

Nope got a $60 dollar 160GB that will outlast the machine. Plus to mini stack empty cases for drives (NewerTech miniStack FireWire and USB Hub and Hard Drive up to 750GB at OtherWorldComputing.com)

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Geek

So tell me more about this XBMC product...I perused through the site and I think I get it but there is one thing I didn't see mentioned - DVR capability. Can it do that?

If they release an updated Mini like it is rumored, it might be the perfect candidate for something like this with two 500GB drives. As long as it can run with the Apple Remote or if the Mini can learn a universal remote this could be the beez kneez!

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"People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people"
Motorcycle fanatic?

ssg

Hmm, I don't think the XBMC can do DVR, that is one shortcoming..there are a few. I should add it originally attracted me because it would put my old Xbox to good use

It seems to mostly be a 'play what you've got' sort of application, which is what I have here.

Also, I might be missing something but for DVR capability, are you talking like tv tuner card, etc?


edit: due to my line of work, DVR is my enemy so it isn't a feature I look for Now nDVR == awesome.

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colryn

I have an update.

I just installed a faster CPU into my Mini. Wow. I swear performance just increased by over 20%. The orginal chip was a 1.83Ghz. The new chip is a 2.33Ghz screamer. This little mighty mite screams. The OS loads so much quicker. I have yet to see the spinning beach ball at all. I just now loaded Fusion and this does not miss a beat.

I purchased the chip off of ebay. I was a little hesitant buying from a seller in China but I must say, it went very smooth. The person had a 100% approval rating. So, I think it was worth it.