[mjkearns]

Hi,

Had my mini for a couple of weeks now, and thoroughly loving it (my PC has been confined to the corner of the room, and will soon be put in the basement as a VNC server).

I bought the 1.42 model with a 512M upgrade, and aside from the obvious slowdown in disk-intensive applications because of the 4200RPM drive, it's been brilliant.

I never seem to have less than 150M free RAM with the things I do, and even when I run heavy tasks, the memory seems fine, with only the processor and disk slowing things down.

So, is it worth me upgrading the RAM to 1G ? I already have the chip, but I don't want to bother if I won't see a performance increase - does the memory used adapt itself to the total installed ? Should it ever reach full usage, or does it always leave a buffer ?

Thanks for any advice/opinions. (Just please don't tell me to upgrade because 1G is *bound* to be better).

Michael.

[Big Mac]

If you have a reported 150MBs free even with the heaviest usage you perform, it probably will not make a huge amount of difference to upgrade, but you may as well buy now with RAM as insanely cheap as it is. It was cheap before - four months ago - and the RAM I purchased then is a whopping $45 less expensive!

[Goldfinger]

If you have the chip, then why not ? You will see a performance increase.

[mrbass]

I have 512MB...I like someone to report the advantages of 1GB too. I also always see ample room with 512MB. Right now only benefit I can see for myself going from 512MB to 1GB is being able to put a 512MB virtual ram disk using the free Esperance http://www.mparrot.net/index.php?page=esperance_dv
Only problem is I can't figure out how to chance my cache location in firefox.

[Goldfinger]

More RAM will always result in a speed boost even if you don't use all your RAM right now. That's my experience.

[sworthy]

You'll certainly get better performance, but depending on what you do you may not notice it. If you're just web browsing and doing basic tasks like email, etc you probably don't need it. Occasionally it might be nice, but not really a big deal. On the other hand, if you're doing photo manipulation, digital video, or just love to have 20 apps open at the same time it will definitely be noticeable.

[Chimpmaster]

In OSX 10.3 or later you will notice considerable benefit.

FYI I just upgraded the RAM on my G4 Imac from 384MB to 640MB and it is a lot snappier, and photoshop and stuffit and such apps run much faster.

[mjkearns]

Thanks for all of the replies. I decided to go ahead with it yesterday - unfortunately, after opening up the mini, I realised (as I went ot my PC to get the memory) that instead of the 2x 1G sticks I thought I had, there were 4x 512M, so it would seem I don't actually have the chip.

I think I'll go ahead and order one anyway, as the general consensus suggests it will help.

I'm also going to try and upgrade the internal HD I think, to a 7200rpm one. Having loaded around 8000 photos into iPhoto, it's now exceedingly sluggish on startup/shutdown and even browsing smaller albums. The CPU seems okay, and even memory doesn't seem a problem, but menumeters shows some serious disk access going on.

In fact, most of the slowdown seems to be whenever there's serious disk access going on. I have an external firewire enclosure, but that's a lot noisier than just the mini, and in my search for silence, it's not so good.

Oh well. Thanks again.

[tooki]

For how I work, with a gazillion things open, the difference between 512 and 1024 is day and night. Considering how cheap RAM is, why not?

tooki

[polendo]

Hi guys, I just bought a Mini (the 1,42 model). Anyway, I want to upgrade the RAM to 512 which is sufficient for me. Would you think that this memory is a safe buy for the Mac Mini?
Its a Kingston PC3200 Value RAM (KVR400X64C3A/512).

regards

[freakboy2]

intead of upgrading the internal drive, how about getting an external one. you'll get a faster drive, and not have to toss out your old internal one. plus having an external drive has a lot of utility later for backing stuff up, doing OS upgrades, etc. and it's likely easier than tearing open your mini

just a thought

[Eriamjh]

I disagree with Tooki. It is like night and day.

[tooki]

Umm, that's what I said. You ARE agreeing with me!

tooki

[wallinbl]

Originally Posted by tooki

Umm, that's what I said. You ARE agreeing with me!

tooki

You had the order backwards (equating 512 with day and 1024 with night).

Originally Posted by tooki

512 and 1024 is day and night.

[tooki]

OK, now I get it. But the order is entirely irrelevant. The sentence is "the difference between 512 and 1024 is like day and night". The difference between 512 and 1024 and the difference between 1024 and 512 is the same: 512.

Aside from the logical error of equating a number to a day/night phase, saying that what I said was wrong makes the false assumption that day is necessarily better than night!

tooki

[DoFa]

Why mess around with 512mb when 1GB chips are available for $75-80! I paid $145 (a steal at the time) just 2 months ago.

http://www2.newegg.com/Product/Produ...82E16820223020

[trip]

Originally Posted by tooki

OK, now I get it. But the order is entirely irrelevant. The sentence is "the difference between 512 and 1024 is like day and night". The difference between 512 and 1024 and the difference between 1024 and 512 is the same: 512.

Aside from the logical error of equating a number to a day/night phase, saying that what I said was wrong makes the false assumption that day is necessarily better than night!

tooki

I think tooki is a little kooky (in a good way)

[westrock]

I have 1Gb on mine.

You can see that just sitting there not really doing anything substantial it will use as much as you give it. The computer feels very fast considering the specs.

http://webpages.charter.net/westrock/memory.jpg
[All inline images must be no wider than 480 pixels. --tooki]

[sodamnregistered2]

1GB

I almost got 512... after only a couple days... I'm glad I did not.

[fener]

Originally Posted by Big Mac

If you have a reported 150MBs free even with the heaviest usage you perform, it probably will not make a huge amount of difference to upgrade, but you may as well buy now with RAM as insanely cheap as it is. It was cheap before - four months ago - and the RAM I purchased then is a whopping $45 less expensive!

It doesn't matter.

150 free of 512 doesn't mean that when you put in the 1Gb chip, you will have 662 MB free.

Computers use as much ram as possible (Os and apps support) Hence, if you put in the 1 GB ram, OS wil fill it up as muich as possible.

Yes, buy it. It will increase the responsiveness and speed of your computer.

[Eug Wanker]

My GF loads a program in her account, and then never shuts it down.

Thus for me, when her account is active and I've got a lot of stuff running in mine, even 1 GB RAM can be quite limiting. I think 1.5 GB is the sweet spot for two accounts for our usage.

I was considering jumping straight to 2 GB on my iMac 2.0, but I think at this point the extra cash would be a waste. Still, the lure of 2 GB dual channel is there, even though I know it's a marginal speed boost at best for my usage.

[James41]

Originally Posted by mjkearns

Hi,

Had my mini for a couple of weeks now, and thoroughly loving it (my PC has been confined to the corner of the room, and will soon be put in the basement as a VNC server).

I bought the 1.42 model with a 512M upgrade, and aside from the obvious slowdown in disk-intensive applications because of the 4200RPM drive, it's been brilliant.

I never seem to have less than 150M free RAM with the things I do, and even when I run heavy tasks, the memory seems fine, with only the processor and disk slowing things down.

So, is it worth me upgrading the RAM to 1G ? I already have the chip, but I don't want to bother if I won't see a performance increase - does the memory used adapt itself to the total installed ? Should it ever reach full usage, or does it always leave a buffer ?

Thanks for any advice/opinions. (Just please don't tell me to upgrade because 1G is *bound* to be better).

Michael.

On the Mac Mini according to a lot of tests i have seen, 512 ram appears to be a sweet spot and most everything works quite well with it. To upgrade to 1 gig for most things will probably not actually see, with your eyes, any big difference. However, should you get into heavy graphics or video editing, there would probably be a speed up over the 512, maybe not one you will see with your eyes, but in the time it will take to do the conversions and such. Instead of taking 10 hours on a video it might only take 9... but in actual eyeballing the machine and saying, WOW look at that, not likely.

In the upgrade from 256 to 512, yes you did actually see the difference. The jerk and the lag went away.

[mrbass]

512MB is definitely the sweet spot for me. I had 512MB for about 2 months. Put in a 1GB stick about a week ago. I can never get it over 400MB of usage. Now all my computers have 1GB in them but it's really just for qemu and vmware for the x86 computers. If I buy virtual pc one day then the 1GB may come in handy.

[tooki]

I guess it depends on how you work. With me, I usually have about 6 browser windows open, iChat, iTunes, Entourage, and then whatever else I might want to use at the moment. RAM usage usually around 700MB.

tooki

[trip]

If you use VPC get as much RAM as you can get. I'm going for 2Gig! Otherwise 512 is great for average users. or 1 Gig for guys like kooki !