[stwain2003]

Hi all. My friend recently upgraded his PowerPC mini 1.42 to 1GB of RAM from 512MB. After doing that, he said it wasn't that big of a difference. I have a Core Duo mini, and I don't want to spend the money to upgrade to 2GB. Have any of you gone from 512MB to 1GB? Is it a big difference? I usually have the following open;

iChat, Mail, iTunes, Limewire (Rosetta) and Safari.

Sometimes it gets laggy with the 512. Any help appreciated! Thanks!!

[mBurns]

I've gone from 512 to 1 GB of RAM with my 1.42 GHZ eMac. I did not notice a huge difference but it was nice to have the extra RAM since Tiger takes around 512 MB RAM to run.

[kamina]

It really depends on what you do with the computer. I noticed a huge differance when upgrading from 1.5GB to 2GB on my macbook pro, but that's because I actually use the memory. Once your memory runs out, things really start to be slow (especially changing to an app that's in the background).

The main awnser would be this:

If you run alot of programs at the same time, there should be a noticable differance. If you mainly have one (or a few small) apps open at a time then you won't notice a differance.

[harrisjamieh]

On my MacBook, which is basically the same as the Core Mini, I noticed a huge difference when going from the stock 512 to 1GB of RAM. Very worthwhile indeed.. with 512 I could have Safari with a few tabs open and iTunes playing at the same time - after that the slowdowns started.

With 1GB of RAM, I can very nicely run Final Cut Pro, or safari with 10+ tabs, itunes, mail, adiumX all without a slowdown

[stwain2003]

Thank you harris!! I think I'll go with the gig. And thank you to all that took time to reply!

[DakRT]

Yeah I have a mac mini Duo w/512mb of Ram and I am definitely experiencing a slow response. I am thinking of adding a 1gb stick which should bring me to 1.2gb. I am hoping that will be fine, going by the last response, it looks like it will take care of the issue. Does final cut pro run smooth on a mac mini? what about photoshop?

[harrisjamieh]

Be careful; if you use anything graphics intensive, you willl want to upgrade your RAM in matched pairs, ie 2 x 512 sticks - this way you get max performance out of the RAM, and hence graphics.

As for FCP, it runs well (on my MacBook). Unfortunatly, I just tonight tried to edit a project in FCP which consists of 5 DV cams, using multicam, and the computer is unusable as it cannot keep up with the 5 streams. My guess is that the hard drive is the bottleneck - the 5400RPM just isnt fast enough, as FCP is not graphics intensive, and my iMac at the same clock speed can handle the 5 just fine.

Photoshop on Intel Macs is crappy at the moment, as it is not a Universal Binary application. This is set to change sometime in the 1st 1/2 of next year...

[DakRT]

Thanks for the info. btw I hear the hd is a laptop 2.5" drive. Anyone know who has the best price right now for a 7200rpm drive like 100gig? Since you mentioned about the memory being in pairs, I might just go for the 2GB upgrade then.

[mac128k-1984]

How difficult is it to disassemble the mini?