I want to buy a mac mini and make some upgrades (the hard drive and memory). The only concern I have is with warranty. I don't want to do anything to jeopardize that. I lose some of the benefit if I have to hold onto the old hard drive and memory if I upgrade the mini. My original plan was to buy this elsewhere, upgrade it, and then sell the old memory/hard drive on ebay. Is it cheaper if you get memory added by other stores that sell/service macs than if I get apple to add that extra memory, etc at time of purchase? I assume this way it would keep the warranty in good standing.
I saw with Apple you can customize the mini a lot. I have looked at other stores I can buy the mini's from cheaper but they just see to sell the stock minis with no upgrades. Are there any places that sell them with upgrades?
Also, I'm using to the PC field and of course there is so much bloatware. is this true with mac? I know the mini has a 80 gig hard drive which would never be much in the PC Field. As for what I plan to put on it, in addition to OS X and all the products Apple puts on it I plan to use the Office 2004 Suite, Adobe Creative Suite 2, Macromedia (well now Adobe) studio 8, Bryce 5.5, Corel Painter IX, AudioDesk Maya 8, Quicken/Quickbooks, Roxio Toast 7,a good backup program, virus program, and firewall, and possibly QuarkXpress 7, Final Cut Pro 5, FinalDraft 7, Filemaker Pro, Avid Xpress Pro
Of course since I'm new to the Mac I'm not sure which of the last programs I'll use and I will just for example just one video editing program, not go with two. In the PC world this would take a lot of hard drive space but would this work on 80 gigs or would I need 100 or even 120 gigs?
Would this all work with 1 gig (I will expand the mini to at least 1 gig from 512) or should I go all the way to 2 gigs? I assume memory has to be added in pairs.
Thanks in advance for any help.
Top