Two blog posts in a day is some sort of record I think...
I saw a deal recently that was way too good to pass up: 3GB of RAM for $44. Having struggled all semester with rendering in final cut, I decided to take the plunge. Why 3GB instead of 4GB to get matched pairs? The intel mac minis can only support up to 3GB of RAM due to a chipset limitation.
Having taken my PPC mini apart before, I figured this time around would be cake. Boy was I wrong.
RAM placement in PPC Mac Mini
RAM placement in intel Mac Mini
Yes, to install RAM in the new mini, you have to take the entire top chassis apart. It was a royal pain, especially given how cold it is in here. My hands were shaking, and that's not a good thing when handling equipment this small. This puts a serious damper on my plan to upgrade the hard drive in this thing to something faster in the near future. I may work up the courage to do it, but not for a LONG while.
Before
After
I ran some benchmarks just to have some numbers using geek bench. These are the numbers before the upgrade and these are after. Not much of a difference numerically, but in my own tests, apps launch faster and doing touchups in iPhoto doesn't make my computer die.
One more test I'm going to run before the end of tonight is running Ubuntu in VirtualBox. Before, I couldn't even get through the installation due to only having one gig of RAM. We'll see if I can install it now.
Activity monitor states right now that I am using 1.58GB of RAM, which means that before, that .5 would have been thrown into swap, which would account for how noisy the machine was before. Now I can barely hear it, which is a little disturbing.
Enough bragging for now.
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