I have a 1.5 TB external drive, but it's enclosure only supports Firewire 400 and USB 2. And in what felt like a true moment of impulsivity, I ordered a G-RAID 2TB Dual External Hard Drive to speed moving files from the G5 to the Mini. Fortunately, I had an unused, legal copy of Windows 7 on hand, or running Windows on the Mini would have been a deal breaker. Since I planned to run Windows 7 on the Mini, a copy of Parallels Desktop 7 for Mac was in order. The Seagate's 7200 RPM rotational speed also was more attractive than the 5400 RPM of the bigger Samsung drive. Samsung currently offers 1 TB laptop drives, but I've had good luck with Seagates and brand loyalty won out. Since the Mac Mini uses a 2.5" laptop drive, the maximum size I could do was a 750 GB Seagate Momentus. A no brainer was the surprisingly inexpensive Kingston 8 GB RAM upgrade. Having parted with a sum approaching a new Mac Mini (with no upgrades), I quickly doubled down on my investment by ordering all the extras I would need to make the Mac Mini measure up to and hopefully exceed the G5's performance. The machine had already been upgraded to 4 GB of RAM and had a 320 GB hard drive and all of its original documentation, disks, and adapters. I lost the first one I bid on, but hit on the second. They currently fetch a price close to and sometimes exceeding a brand new Mac Mini from Apple! Undaunted, I began bidding conservatively on Mac Minis. īut as I looked around at Mini offerings from lots of vendors around the web, I found that lots of other folks apparently had the same view of the 2010 model as I. Having such a machine would also allow me to run Windows 7 on it using Parallels 7 for Mac. Checking it's specifications on Low End Mac, I found that it still had a built-in DVD player/burner that was dropped in the latest version, could handle 8 GB of incredibly inexpensive RAM, was reputed to be quite fast, and could run either Snow Leopard or Lion or both. But my first Mini had been a solid performer.Īs I looked, I became intrigued by the 2010 Mac Mini. I quickly outgrew my Mini, selling it just ten months later when I moved to a PowerBook. I'm not a rookie with the Mini, as I was one of the thousands who overwhelmed the Apple Store in January, 2005, to order one on the day the model was introduced. Having recently mucked about a good bit on eBay looking for motherboards and power supplies, I wandered into their Mac Mini sales, just to see what was available and for how much. Having put off moving to a new box for far too long, almost all of my software was PowerPC only, and Apple's Lion (Mac OS X 10.7) operating system that currently ships on all new Macs from Apple doesn't support such applications as it did under Leopard and Snow Leopard's Rosetta. The total cost of even the least expensive new Macintosh, when I considered all the options I wanted, plus the cost of new software, was way over the means of a retired school teacher. (And yes, I was just flat out lucky the lightning didn't cook the HP's mobo, too.) But I was still out of luck on testing new, Mac-only applications that almost universally require an Intel chip and at least Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6).Īfter receiving the necessary spousal approval for purchasing a new computer, I quickly suffered sticker shock. It's owner abandoned it after a lightning strike took out the power supply, but a new, beefier power supply, a dual core CPU, and a wireless card allowed me to test many applications under Windows 7. I was able to partially get around that by using the HP I recently rebuilt. While the G5 was still powerful enough to do my daily computing tasks, most of the new applications I wanted to review for Educators' News required an Intel based Mac. Although I had a backup unit that I quickly switched over to, and eventually bought a whole "new" seven-year-old Macintosh dual 2.0 GHz G5 tower, it was getting to be time to move to something much newer and more reliable. I pretty well knew the handwriting was on the wall when my seven-year-old Macintosh dual 1.8 GHz G5 tower cooked its motherboard.
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