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Got me a Mac Mini

Mac Mini

I just bought myself a Mac mini (1.2 Ghz, 265Mb RAM, 40 Gig HD) for 399€ in the MediaMarkt. They have them on sale as they are clearing their old stock out. Actually I am not so sure that they are going to buy new mac’s at all.

This was going to be a headless server box, but it is sooo much snappier than my powerbook.
Well, after my do-it-your-self-upgrade to 1 Gigabyte RAM, that is (I ordered it online from www.crucial.com). Otherwise it crawls along if you open more than 2 apps, due to Apple’s decision at the time to give the minimum amount of memory OS X could run on.

I am planning on buying a 200 Gb Iomega external firewire disk ‘minimax’ to complement it and have set it up to on my KVM switch.

My Mac powerbook (G4 867Mhz, 768 MB Ram, 40 Gig) was bought almost 2,5 years ago. I use it for all my email and photo’s and homevideo factory, but it is getting a bit long in the tooth to run the latest mac applications like Garageband, iMovie and iDVD which all seem to expect gigabytes of RAM, a fast disk and at least a 1Ghz CPU. And as for games, I can forget playing those that came out the last year or so.

As an aside, the gaming scene on the mac is seriously handicapped : only the most lucrative games are ported to the Mac, and you always have to wait 3 to 6 months for them to arrive (one exception : World of Warcraft !).
So I continued playing the latest games on my pc (Half-Life 2 and recently Guild Wars) and I even upgraded my graphic card to a Radeon 9800 SE which, while not the very latest card, still allows me play all of the games I want playing. With 2 kids, I don’t exactly have lots of free time anymore…

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