Mac mini slow.

Slow is always relative, but ...

I would not run VMware Fusion with less than 2Gb in the Mini. I have a 1.83 C2D Mini with 4GB ram and a 7200RPM 200GB hard drive. I upgraded the memory and disk to get the best performance I could from the mini. They were relatively cheap upgrades and there are plenty of video guides around (check other world computing for example) that show how to perform the upgrades.

I upgraded from a WinXP box running a Pentium D 930 CPU to the Mini and was pleased with the performance. At the time, I also had a Dell 520 laptop with the same CPU as in the Mini you have and still thought that the Mini running OS X was more responsive for general web browsing/e-mail type tasks. (I now have an early 2008 MacBook Pro to replace the laptop and it meets my expectations for performance.)

In general, the Mini is basically laptop components from 2+ generations ago. The performance will generally not keep up with the performance of the equivalent priced off-the-shelf Windows PC. (Lots of Mac fans have complained about this for sometime, but there is no hard evidence that Apple is doing anything about it.) INTEL will cease making the CPU chips being used in the Mini by mid-2009 ... so at that point, it will either be dead, or will have been replaced/upgraded.

Something does not sound right.....

I have the following system:

Mac Mini PowerPC G4 (1.25GHZ)
1GB RAM
Mac OS X 10.5.5 (Leopard)

This system is a generation behind the setup that you have. However, my system runs fine...I rarely see the spinning pinwheel.

It may be that the operating system did not install correctly. Also, did you repair disk permissions, using Disk Utility? You also might consider running DiskWarrior on your system.


richmlow

abssorb said:

This is our first mac, after windows / linux machines.

Mac mini 2Ghz intel core 2 duo with 1Gb of Ram. Running leopard 10.5.5

Everything we do, we see the spinning pinwheel for as long as 10 / 20 seconds. If we run VMware, it's often unusable.

I'm probably missing a lot of basic knowledge - but something is making this unbearably slow. Any suggestions welcome.

Click to expand...

Check out Activity Monitor (found in Applications>Utilities) for how much free ram you have, or to find something unexpected using it.

As others have suggested, repair disk permissions.


Perhaps disable dashboard or not use as many widgets if thats the case.
Also be sure you have enough room on your hard disk for virtual memory (>6GB).