[skeptic]

Well this weekend I picked up a mini. What a great little machine. I have wanted to update my rapidly aging Beige g3 for a long time. And I finally convinced my wife and went down to Best buy and grabbed one. I got the base model G4 1.25mhz with a 40gig drive 256 Mb RAM and CDRW/DVD. Here are my questions:

1. Should I go with 1Gig or 512Mb RAM? What difference will it make? between the 2?

2. I want to up the Hard drive. Should I upgrade the Drive in the case? Or should I get an enclosure and add an external. If I want the extrenal, is FireWire or USB better for speed? My thinking on the external is that when I upgrade to a new mini in a couple of years I can just move the drive. Also it would be handy to have an external for upgrading my wifes laptop next year.

3. Eventually I want to get a DVD burner. What would be best and the most compatible with iDVD? again internal vs external?

[Goldfinger]

1. Get 1GB but buy your RAM somewhere else, Apple rips you off with their memory prices.
2. Get an external one, FW or USB2 doens't really matter all that much altough FW has proven to be faster in some situations. If you get an internal upgrade then keep in mind that you need to buy a 2.5" laptop HD. Not fullsize 3.5" HDs. You are limited in capacity and speed with 2.5" HDs.
3. Get the SuperDrive option in your Mac mini.

[skeptic]

I already own the mini. So it realy is not an option for me anymore to have apple do the superdrive. Unless I goto the Apple store that they are going to be openning this fall in a town close to me. Or by a drive and crack the case and do it myself.

[Luca Rescigno]

I have 1 GB of RAM. I'd recommend going for that over 512 MB. I mean, RAM is really cheap these days, and you'll eventually want to upgrade it to 1 GB anyway, so why not now? I use MenuMeters to monitor my RAM use, and while it doesn't get over 512 MB that often, it's often enough that I'm pretty sure having 1 GB is beneficial.

External drives are a better deal. If you got the 40 GB hard drive, there's a good chance it's a 5400 RPM (check Apple System Profiler and look for the Vendor ID or Model Number or something for the hard drive). My 1.25 GHz mini has a 40 GB, 5400 RPM drive, and I'm satisfied with disk performance. The 80 GB drives never ship as 5400 RPM though. If you get a LaCie Porsche (pretty cheap) or roll your own external drive (even cheaper), you can get a huge amount of storage for the same price. So in addition to the 40 GB of internal storage, you can get 120, 160, 200, or 250 GB of external storage. I'd go with Firewire... it's a little faster than USB 2.0, and USB ports are hard to come by on the mini.

Other World Computing sells a DVD burner for the mini for $150. The model is the Pioneer DVR-K04, so if you can find a better deal somewhere else on that particular drive you may as well go for it. But when I upgraded my mini to a Superdrive (decided I really did want DVD burning after all, after I bought it), OWC had the best deal. They're at http://eshop.macsales.com.

Oh yeah, opening the mini isn't really that bad. The first time I did it was a nightmare because I didn't know what I was doing. Then I watched the comprehensive installation video that OWC has on their site, and it became really easy. The one I read told me to use two putty knives and didn't have any illustrations... it's actually easier with one putty knife. The hardest part is probably getting the case back on properly, or maybe screwing the optical drive back in (some of the screws don't have a straight line of sight so you have to angle the screwdriver in order to tighten them). But it's really not that bad.

[csi95]

Originally Posted by skeptic

I already own the mini. So it realy is not an option for me anymore to have apple do the superdrive. Unless I goto the Apple store that they are going to be openning this fall in a town close to me.

That won't help.

I originally bought the 1.42 mini with a standard combo drive. After about a week I regretted not getting the superdrive, and called the Apple Store where I bought it. They said that they don't do upgrades on the superdrives. My only option was to return the original mini, pay the 10% restocking fee, and get a new mini that came from the factory with a superdrive (and 512Mb RAM and an Airport card and a Bluetooth module).

I'm glad I did though...

[Kyros]

Get a minimate to deal with the hard drive thing. Someone should have a link, or you can google it. And then tell us how well it works .

[ideasculptor]

No need to send your mini back just to upgrade the superdrive. Just buy a superdrive equivalent laptop dvd recorder and install it yourself. Watch the OWC video for instructions. It will be both cheaper and easier than BTO

[Randman]

I got 1GB of ram with a 1.42 model. I went with combo drive since it's more for the misses (I have superdrive on my PB17). Liking it so far (get AirPort and bluetooth if you can).