Mini me?
I’m weak. I admit it. I caved in to my own peer pressure. Yup, I bought a Mac Mini.
So, what do I think?
Well, it’s not exactly fast, but you knew that right. I picked up the low end model, which means 256 MB of ram. I see a putty knife and a 1GB stick in my future. Take a look at the video on how to open the thing up.
Just out of curiosity I installed a copy of Ubuntu linux. I’m normally more of a slackware guy, but I had heard decent things about Ubuntu and decided to give it a try. The install was remarkably easy. Everything worked out of the box except for sound. From what I’ve heard there is a patch available to get sound at least partially working. For now OSX goes back on the mini.
The mini is remarkably quiet. You can just barely hear the hard drive spin up every once in a while. Well, it’s quiet if you don’t try to use the optical drive. Wow! That thing is loud, and it vibrates like crazy. My entire desk was vibrating while burning a cd. This was probably my biggest disappointment.
I hooked the mini up to my HD set via the DVI input on my TV. The picture was very crisp as expected, but there was still quite a bit of overscan. I’m gonna have to do some research and testing to try and get this fixed. There are a couple of utilities to do this here and here.
Overall, I’m happy with the purchase(especially at the price I paid).
