[Burke]

I just used the putty knife method to pry it open. Pretty easy, just like the video tutorial shows, but you really have to not worry about the cracking noise AND protect the outer casing with your free hand while prying.

Upgrading the memory is no problem, but swapping the hard drive is a completely different beast. You literally have to disassemble almost the entire mini, and Lord help ya if you don't put all your screws in a centralized location, lol. But after 30 minutes or so, I popped in the 60 GB Hitachi 7200 RPM drive and 1 GB stick of Crucial and put in the install disc, did the updates, and voila! Up and running.

First order of business is to find a third-party app that will speed up cursor tracking (besides the System Preference). I move my mouse with my fingertips and not my whole hand, and using IntelliPoint under Windows, I had very precise movement with my mouse/cursor. On the Mac, it moves fast when you move the cursor over a long distance, but sloooooooooows way down when trying to mouse in an area of small diameter. It also seems to slow down over icons and whatnot.

So far, though, I'm mucking my way through things to get used to the Finder and whatnot.

[jon l. dawson]

Yeah I have noticed this exact same thing with the mouse, if you find a solution let me know, I've just been trying to get used to it. Congrats on the Mini, glad to hear all your upgrades were a success.

[tooki]

The Mac has always used a mouse acceleration curve -- that means that when you move the mouse quickly, it moves the pointer farther than if you move the mouse the same distance slowly. It may make it seem "slow" at first, but you'll also find that it really helps accurate mouse movement.

tooki

[Burke]

Okay, I solved my issues for the most part.

I downloaded USB Overdrive X (shareware) and MouseZoom (free).

I set USB Overdrive X to 120 dpi and 80% acceleration, and set MouseZoom to 1.0814609 and it's almost identical to the tracking I got in Windows.

I am using an MS IntelliMouse Explorer 3.0. just FYI.

[smic]

or you could have gotten the microsoft intellipoint software, which is pretty much an ms branded usb overdrive, and it has the side tilt scrolling support on the ms mice

[Burke]

Originally posted by smic:
or you could have gotten the microsoft intellipoint software, which is pretty much an ms branded usb overdrive, and it has the side tilt scrolling support on the ms mice

Tried that, and it just wasn't the same.

[mak_attack]

hi Burke,

glad to see upgrades went well.

can you comment on the performance of the mini with 1gb ram.

what programs are you going to be using? how is it performing so far?

thanks,

[jon l. dawson]

Originally posted by Burke:
Okay, I solved my issues for the most part.

I downloaded USB Overdrive X (shareware) and MouseZoom (free).

I set USB Overdrive X to 120 dpi and 80% acceleration, and set MouseZoom to 1.0814609 and it's almost identical to the tracking I got in Windows.

I am using an MS IntelliMouse Explorer 3.0. just FYI.

Thanks, managed to get it .. well, half better. The usb overdrive software doesn't support bluetooth mice (yet), so I couldn't use it to set the acceleration. Mousezoom did help with the overall speed, though, and that's a start. I guess I'll have to wait for the next version of usb overdrive. I have a logitech mx900.

[Burke]

Originally posted by mak_attack:
hi Burke,

glad to see upgrades went well.

can you comment on the performance of the mini with 1gb ram.

what programs are you going to be using? how is it performing so far?

thanks,

It seems to be quite "zippy," especially after applying some tweak to load pages faster in Safari (I think it was done in Cocktail, but I can't be sure). The only programs I'm using right now are the included apps and a few third-party apps like Transmit and Unison, and several of the ones listed here.

The only thing that is obvious is the lack of a powerful GPU (or at least one with more VRAM). Scrolling seems slow and resizing windows is very choppy. I even disabled the drop shadows, which helped some, but it's still a bit slow. Plus, I tried World of Warcraft, and, well, ya know...lol.

The one thing I am really pleased with is DVD playback. It's virtually flawless -- the picture is as good as my TV, no banding or weird blockiness I used to experience on my PC with a much faster DVD-ROM drive and overall subsystem.

[mbryda]

Originally posted by Burke:
The only thing that is obvious is the lack of a powerful GPU (or at least one with more VRAM). Scrolling seems slow and resizing windows is very choppy. I even disabled the drop shadows, which helped some, but it's still a bit slow. Plus, I tried World of Warcraft, and, well, ya know...lol.

Who resizes windows? Just curious as I hardly ever do it on my Mac or PC. Hit green on the Mac and it resizes automagically. Hit Max on the PC and it does it too. I rarely grab the window and resize.

Heck, on this PC I'm typing on, Firefox won't resize smoothly....

Scrolling same thing - I use the scrollwheel or Cmd-End to go to the end of a document.

Glad to hear it's a great little machine. From my 30 mins of playing at the Apple store, it seemed quite speedy, even hooked up to the 23" display.

[kjbetz]

Originally posted by Burke:
I just used the putty knife method to pry it open. Pretty easy, just like the video tutorial shows, but you really have to not worry about the cracking noise AND protect the outer casing with your free hand while prying.

Upgrading the memory is no problem, but swapping the hard drive is a completely different beast. You literally have to disassemble almost the entire mini, and Lord help ya if you don't put all your screws in a centralized location, lol. But after 30 minutes or so, I popped in the 60 GB Hitachi 7200 RPM drive and 1 GB stick of Crucial and put in the install disc, did the updates, and voila! Up and running.

...

Do you have BT or AE?

I'm thinking of doing the exact same upgrades on mine that should be arriving in about 2 weeks.