In November 2008, I purchased a basic Mac Mini for whatever the price was — I think it was $599.\u00a0 I had decided to make the leap from Windows XP to Mac OS.\u00a0 I was leery, but many of friends had been using Macs for years and swore by them for ease of use and reliability.\u00a0 I had the 17″ MacBookPro picked out.\u00a0 Fully tricked out — heck even pretty basic — they run $3000.\u00a0 What if I made the leap and didn’t like it?\u00a0 That made me nervous.\u00a0 But the Mac Mini was a fully functioning Mac for the price of a Windows machine.\u00a0 I had a great 17″ Samsung monitor.\u00a0 I had keyboards and mice (but, to be honest, I bought a snazzy new Microsoft ergonomic keyboard and sleek Logitech mouse – my mice have to be sleek, I mouse with my left hand).\u00a0 For a minimal investment, I’d know if I could tolerate Mac.\u00a0 You know what they say, “Once you go Mac, you never look back.”\u00a0 Oh, that’s not quite how it goes?\u00a0 Shrug.\u00a0 Works that way for me.<\/p>\n
I have embraced my Mini, but last summer I ran up against the poor little critter just not having enough memory.\u00a0 iFixit<\/a> has a great website that walks you through the process of opening your Mac Mini (you need a putty knife).\u00a0 The new once have an easily removed bottom cover to facilitate memory and hard drive replacement.\u00a0 Mine was one model before that, so I need a putty knife.\u00a0 The step by step instructions are great, and this long ago electronics tech had no trouble making the upgrade.\u00a0 The Mini has been doing well with 2.5G RAM.\u00a0 The poor Mini came with only an 80G hard drive.\u00a0 This summer, I’m up against a hard drive space issue.\u00a0 At the moment, if I keep my trash emptied, I have 7G of open space on the hard drive.\u00a0 That’s not enough.\u00a0 I have a 1TB external drive that I run Time Machine on as well as keep my music and pictures, but I need a longer term solution.<\/p>\n If you’re Facebook Friends with me, you know I’ve mentioned getting a new iMac and probably getting a new Mini when it comes out.\u00a0 You already know I sprang for the 11″ MacBook Air last fall, and I love it.\u00a0 But the more I think about it, the more I wonder if maybe a new hard drive might be all my Mini needs to keep me purring along.\u00a0 This months Macworld has a Do It Yourself feature with instructions to “Make A New Boot Drive.”\u00a0 I can clone my current boot drive and remove and replace the 80G drive with, oh, say, 500G for under $100.\u00a0 ($60 for the drive, $20-40 for the drive dock to clone to, and maybe some cloning software — I may not even need that if I restore from Time Machine).\u00a0 That’s looking like a better solution that buying another machine.<\/p>\n What do you guys think?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In November 2008, I purchased a basic Mac Mini for whatever the price was — I think it was $599.\u00a0 I had decided to make the leap from Windows XP to Mac OS.\u00a0 I was leery, but many of friends had been using Macs for years and swore by them …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech-stuff"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3121"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3121\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}