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neps · May 2, 2005, 11:01 PM

I'm picking up a Mac Mini for my folks to replace my old 7600 that they have been using since I left for college years ago. They probably will only be using it for email and internet, and maybe a digital camera. I hope they go for more, but not sure how excited they'll be. I'm gonna leave it at the base memory for now. I was wondering if anyone else has and how has it ran for you?

Randman · May 3, 2005, 03:30 AM

If you can get 512, it'll be better.

polendo · May 3, 2005, 10:25 AM

Hi neps.. it just happened that yesterday I was supposed to get me a copy of Tiger (ONLY), and I left the store with a Mac Mini - I'm hopeless. Anyway, I picked up the 1.42 model and to my surprise the thing is fast with the base 256 MB RAM. The only thing I did yesterday, since it was a bit late, was to download all the patches and stuff (unfortuntaley ,mine has Panther).. but I did tried Safari. It works absolutely fine, the speed is fine. Sincerely, it doesn't look like it needs more memory.. nevertheless I'm sure it will have a noticeable boost if you upgrade the memory. But like I said.. with 256 of RAM it was fast on Safari.

regards

ps: my reference of comparison is a G3 iBook 700 with 640 MB of RAM

Luca Rescigno · May 3, 2005, 01:19 PM

256 MB of RAM sucks. It's not an acceptable amount. If you think it's good, then you obviously haven't seen it with 512 MB.

Seriously, I was getting beachballs for ANYTHING I tried to do. ANYTHING. Upgraded to 1 GB and it's speedy.

polendo · May 3, 2005, 02:07 PM

Hi Luca,

Actually just this very moment I finished installing the 512 MB on the Mac mini.

Anyway, If you use *only* Safari I feel its rather fine. I also thought that I would be playing at the beach the whole day if I kept the memory at 256, but to my suprise, at least in my Mac mini I haven't seen the beach ball at all (with only Safari working). Anyway, now I have upgraded to 512 and it feels actually the same.. I guess if I start opening more apps. is when the difference will be noticed. BTW, it was a bit of a pain to open up the Mini since you hear all kind of cracks of the plastic.. but looks that I haven't broken a thing.

regards

Luca Rescigno · May 3, 2005, 02:15 PM

I just remember that with mine, when I had only 256 MB, I would get beachballs with only iChat open, when adding the people on my buddy list to my address book. After about 15 of those, I'd get a 2-3 second beachball each time, and the only solution was to quit iChat and reopen it. Trying to use more than one application at once was miserable.

In fact, the performance with 256 MB of RAM was almost, dare I say it, *worse* than the performance on a 1 GHz eMac with 128 MB of RAM I used about a year and a half ago. Before I upgraded the RAM, it was at 128 MB, and it was surprisingly not that bad, probably because of the much faster hard drive. Having a fast hard drive does help a lot.

stinch · May 3, 2005, 08:03 PM

They will probably get away with it if they are used to old hardware don't open more than one or two programs at once and are patient.

I managed about 2 hours with 256Mb before replacing it with 512Mb. With 256Mb it behaved as any modern machine with a slow laptop drive and not enough ram.

JHromadka · May 3, 2005, 10:42 PM

For what it's worth, Apple is offering 512MB of memory for only $50 extra (was $75).

James41 · May 10, 2005, 10:27 AM

I too vote for the 512. It is the sweet spot for the mini. Lag and jerk with only 256 go away...

tooki · May 12, 2005, 12:05 AM

Yeah, running Mac OS X with 256MB of RAM is an exercise in frustration and WILL have your parents calling you to ask why it stalls for seconds at a time.

tooki

icibaqu · May 12, 2005, 12:26 AM

512 at $50 bucks.

damn! apple is like HELLO - get more RAM. next step is free.

so basically - get them at least the 512

polendo · May 12, 2005, 12:14 PM

512 at 50 is a good price. I would pay that just for convenience! and forget about being asked about the beach ball.

James41 · May 13, 2005, 10:01 AM

Or, if you really want to get it over with, New Egg has some 1 gig Corsair ValueSelect ram chips for only $95 or some Rosewell 1 gigers for about $80.

robdot1 · May 13, 2005, 11:05 PM

I just bought a MacMini a couple of days ago. The plan was to upgrade memory from a PC store. After talking to several stores, most had to order in PC2700 1Gig modules ($185 CDN). Most don't stock it cause it's an old style and too slow. So they suggested that I could try a 512MB PC3200 400Mhz ($59 CDN) that they had, see if it works, then order in a 1Gig PC3200 400Mhz ($129 CDN). I was hesitant, as the Apple supplier emphasized the authorized PC2700, and only from Apple themselves ($319 CDN).

So, to my amazement and anger, I pulled out the original memory, and it was a PC3200 400Mhz 256MB which the Apple dealer said would not work.

And so, the PC3200 400Mhz 512GB works fine now, and I will be exchanging that for the PC3200 400Mhz 1GB module, with a savings of $190 CDN.

And then, onto the next phase of my plan. Overclock my 1.25Ghz up to 1.42Ghz.

dws · May 14, 2005, 10:43 AM

So a person opens a forum thread with the question of whether or not 256 is enough for people who do little more than email and surf the web... And, instantly, people respond with absurd stories; giving the impression that Apple has sold a faulty device.

It simply isn't true. For this person's parents, the rare occasions when they will want to run more applications than 256 can handle; virtual memory will take over. The swap files will increase in size automatically. The appearance of the spinning beach ball for a second or two now and then would have been irrelevant to these people's lives.

A far better response would have been to say, go ahead and let them have fun with the stock Mac mini; and then, after a year or two, pop in a gig stick. By that time, the parents would have expanded their use of their computer so that they would need more memory. Adding more memory then would be as if they had gotten a brand new computer. Doing it now is gilding the lilly.

tooki · May 14, 2005, 11:18 AM

I disagree with that entirely — beginning users especially are intolerant of delays and stalls. Surely you've seen beginning users click over and over again as the computer fails to respond within the a reasonable amount of time, only making things take longer once the computer does respond.

You have to understand that Mac OS X itself will use (provided it's available) about 235MB just to finish booting. It will somewhat scale back on Macs with less than 512MB of RAM, but it suffers. The Mac mini, with its slow notebook hard drive, suffers particularly from having to swap. I do not believe that anything below 384MB is acceptable for Mac OS X, and I recommend to every user that they upgrade beyond 512MB, because Mac OS X puts it to good use. I am one of the people that does agree that 256MB is insufficient RAM for any user of Mac OS X, and that considering the low cost of RAM, Apple should not ship any machines with that little.

As for your cockamamie scam of waiting a year or two, if I made a relative suffer for that long, when I finally put in the extra RAM, they'd say "You waited two years to do this while I suffered with a slow computer? You mean my computer was this fast all along? I'm gonna kill you!" Besides, RAM is very cheap right now. It may be more expensive in the future.

tooki

Hi I'm Ben · May 14, 2005, 11:35 AM

The ram makes a GIANT difference. People that try and tell you different are trying to live some kind freakish lie.

Maybe they want to believe their machine is adequate or that apple wouldn't possibly sell a "crippled" machine. In all seriousness though, look around all the latest machines come stock with 512. All PowerMacs, PowerBooks, iMacs, the last time a machine was stupidly released with 256 was the release of the Mini. I seriously doubt anymore updated products are going to be sold with less than 512. It just doesn't give a very good first impression to a switcher otherwise, especially if they came from a decent PC.

James41 · May 15, 2005, 10:13 AM

I agree, 256 is not enough for decent performance. A crippled machine gives a bad first impression to a new user. Raising a mini to 512 smooths out the performance very nicely. My imac came with 256 and you could see a big difference when i added another 512 to it, made it a very usable machine.