I might have the slowest Mac in the world

Congratulations? Why don't you just get a cheaper SSD and toss it in there to make it faster?

you have 3 options from what i can see, kill your self, upgrade to SSD and more RAM or just buy a new mini

I'm sure Paul Simon wrote a song about where this thread is headed...

Oh no. That was Graceland.

OP tried to kill himself but his argument wasn't a process or job ID. waah waaah

eBay those relics!

money can be a problem. however if you sold both those items you would be close to 500 i would imagine. its 568 usd for a 2011 mac mini base from amazon. best bet would be to shoot for one of those. every holiday ask for amazon gift cards. christmas birthday whatever. you will get there eventually.

aaronvan said:

My main machine is a Mac Mini (Macmini1,1) with a 1.66 GHz Intel Core Duo and 1GB of RAM running SL. I hate this miserable slowcoach machine. I live with an almost constant spinning beach ball. It takes forever for anything to open and I hit force quit more times in an hour than most of you do in a month. Using this thing feels like wading through the La Brea tar pits with cement shoes.

My other machine is a Blue & White G3. My life sucks.

Click to expand...

Not really sure if you are asking for help or throwing a pity party for yourself. Get a part time job and save for a month and boom you will have enough for a base mini.... At least thats what hard working people do if they need something better and can't afford it....

aaronvan said:

My main machine is a Mac Mini (Macmini1,1) with a 1.66 GHz Intel Core Duo and 1GB of RAM running SL. I hate this miserable slowcoach machine. I live with an almost constant spinning beach ball. It takes forever for anything to open and I hit force quit more times in an hour than most of you do in a month. Using this thing feels like wading through the La Brea tar pits with cement shoes.

My other machine is a Blue & White G3. My life sucks.

Click to expand...

Lol. I feel for you.

You can upgrade the CPU as that version of Mac mini has a socketed CPU. A T7200 SL9F 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo can be had for $30 from eBay and will double your CPU power. The RAM maximum is 2GB without firmware hacks and swapping the hard drive for a higher capacity 7200rpm drive will speed up things dramatically if you still have the original 5400RPM drive still in there. This is what I've done to my daily driver.

The forums over at 123macmini.com are a great help.

do you also live alone in a cheap motel room with peeling walls, grimy and leaky bathtub, and a view to a buzzing neon sign flooding the whole thing with a sickening red light all night long?

I bet you use your mini to write dirty crime novels no one will ever read!



edit: I up-voted you just because you're funny!

I have same machine...(bought about a week ago)...First thing i did was take it apart (fairly simple using this site..see below),then i blew out all the dust from years of past use...then I did a clean erase (zeroing harddrive) and installing snowleopard fresh...I never,repeat never get the beachball waiting...in fact i swear this thing is as fast as my macbook from late 2007...

http://www.applefritter.com/Mac_Mini_Take_Apart_Guide

Maybe your hardrive is going bad? Maybe you need to do a clean install or osx?

aaronvan said:

My main machine is a Mac Mini (Macmini1,1) with a 1.66 GHz Intel Core Duo and 1GB of RAM running SL. I hate this miserable slowcoach machine. I live with an almost constant spinning beach ball. It takes forever for anything to open and I hit force quit more times in an hour than most of you do in a month. Using this thing feels like wading through the La Brea tar pits with cement shoes.

My other machine is a Blue & White G3. My life sucks.

Click to expand...

Let me add to your misery: you don't even have the slowest Mac in the world, so you can't take pleasure, even in that.

If you just want to rant, go ahead. If you want some help, you might want to ask a question.

If I'm right, that's a single-threaded Core Duo, i.e. not even a dual thread C2D. No wonder it's slow.

Also I wouldn't have put Snow Leopard on it. SL really does need 2GB+ to shine. 1GB is far too little. Have you considered down-grading to Leopard or even better, OSX 10.4 Tiger?

Check your software - almost everything that works with SL will work with Leopard, but with Tiger you may need to figure out how to replace a couple of apps.

On that model of Mac Mini, Tiger gets higher Geekbench scores than Leopard, and as the computer was released with Tiger, it will happy with Tiger and 1GB RAM. (1GB is double the 512MB the computer was released with).

A good reason to avoid Tiger for Leopard would be if you use Time Machine, which is brilliant but not in Tiger. Other ways to backup on Tiger:

https://getsatisfaction.com/apple/topics/what_is_an_easy_backup_solution_for_os_x_10_4_tiger

So your options:

Free:
Downgrade / reinstall the OS.
Turn off Spotlight (via Onyx or similar) & Dashboard
Turn off as many background services as possible (via Onyx etc)
Remove as much software as you can, especially software that modifies the OS. (or reinstall the OS and only install what you really really need)
Turn off screen savers, desktop background etc.

Low cost:
Cheap SSD (and use your current HD in a USB / Firewire (better) enclosure)
More RAM (2GB)
Replace the processor with a C2D

More expense:
Sell your two systems, and purchase a second hand but newer Mac Mini or a Macbook. I recently bought a 2009 Macbook with C2D 2.2GHZ, 500GB HD, 4GB RAM, Radeon 9300 discrete graphics, for £350 from eBay, and I'm very happy with it.

aaronvan said:

My main machine is a Mac Mini (Macmini1,1) with a 1.66 GHz Intel Core Duo and 1GB of RAM running SL. I hate this miserable slowcoach machine. I live with an almost constant spinning beach ball. It takes forever for anything to open and I hit force quit more times in an hour than most of you do in a month. Using this thing feels like wading through the La Brea tar pits with cement shoes.

My other machine is a Blue & White G3. My life sucks.

Click to expand...

If you don't want the G3 I will happily take it off your hands...

aaronvan said:

My main machine is a Mac Mini (Macmini1,1) with a 1.66 GHz Intel Core Duo and 1GB of RAM running SL. I hate this miserable slowcoach machine. I live with an almost constant spinning beach ball. It takes forever for anything to open and I hit force quit more times in an hour than most of you do in a month. Using this thing feels like wading through the La Brea tar pits with cement shoes.

My other machine is a Blue & White G3. My life sucks.

Click to expand...

And here comes another one... If those are your worst problems, then your life must be great.

Stop the whining and either put 32-Bit Windows 7, a 32-Bit Windows 8 Preview or 32-Bit (X)Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on that machine and be amazed how fast it still is when you run the RIGHT software on that hardware.

Those first generation Intel Minis are awesome Linux machines and EVERYTHING should run out of the box when you install Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora or whatever on it -- those Minis have pure Intel chipsets, and Intel made all the drivers for them available under Open Source licenses. That "old" hardware just works and it works well and fast under Linux.

So stop the whining and give the little box a new life by installing appropriate software on it.

RedTomato said:

If I'm right, that's a single-threaded Core Duo, i.e. not even a dual thread C2D. No wonder it's slow.

I have same model it's not slow at all

Also I wouldn't have put Snow Leopard on it. SL really does need 2GB+ to shine. 1GB is far too little. Have you considered down-grading to Leopard or even better, OSX 10.4 Tiger?

I have snow leopard on mine with 1 gig and it runs great

Check your software - almost everything that works with SL will work with Leopard, but with Tiger you may need to figure out how to replace a couple of apps.

On that model of Mac Mini, Tiger gets higher Geekbench scores than Leopard, and as the computer was released with Tiger, it will happy with Tiger and 1GB RAM. (1GB is double the 512MB the computer was released with).

With one gig of ram I'm getting 2287 geekbench score...thats more then enough for daily use

A good reason to avoid Tiger for Leopard would be if you use Time Machine, which is brilliant but not in Tiger. Other ways to backup on Tiger:

Click to expand...

As i said above,i own same model,same specs...it runs great and no issues with running sl at all!

aaronvan said:

My main machine is a Mac Mini (Macmini1,1) with a 1.66 GHz Intel Core Duo and 1GB of RAM running SL.
[edit]
My other machine is a Blue & White G3. My life sucks.

Click to expand...

Sell the B&W G3 to a collector / Apple fanatic for some money, then buy RAM for your Mini.

I hit force quit more times in an hour

Click to expand...

That doesn't seem right, even considering the age / specs of your computer. Maybe your HD is going bad? Bad RAM?

I'd get more RAM for your mini and see if that works. If you're still having freezes then try replacing both sticks of ram (I'm assuming that model of the mini has 2 RAM slots).

I have the exact same mini. Nothing is wrong. I beachball and run out of memory all the time. It's not bad. Apple said nothing was wrong. All tests passed including memory. Even memtest and techtools delux from the apple care cd said my memory was ok (the machines memory not mine) . The applecare cd verison was outdated so I registered from their website and downloaded 3.1.4. All is good now and everything passed including memory.

And you can't go more than the max 2gb I already have unless it core 2 duo which neither me or the OP has. So nothing is wrong its just a old machine.

You could always just upgrade the memory [link to Crucial.com]. Your Mac can handle 2GB so you're not even at it's maximum potential. It's easy to do - I did it myself. You could even swap the hard drive out and put in a new hard drive if you wanted. My Mac mini has 8GB RAM and a 500GB Hard Drive thanks to my upgrades.

PS: My 2002 iBook G3 (600MHz processor, 640MB RAB, 32GB Hard Drive) is still running, so you by no means have the slowest Mac still running.

See I have only 4 tabs open on safari and I'm already over 600mb of ram just for that alone And If I close everything except to reply here (so only the 1 tab) Still just a little over 516mb. Even with only 1 tab over 500mb so memory management in 10.6 is not very good.

you can put in an ssd so when the mini runs out of ram it will go to an ssd not a slow hdd. page outs and swaps on a hdd are much slower then on an ssd.

ivnj said:

See I have only 4 tabs open on safari and I'm already over 600mb of ram just for that alone And If I close everything except to reply here (so only the 1 tab) Still just a little over 516mb. Even with only 1 tab over 500mb so memory management in 10.6 is not very good.

Click to expand...

What Safari windows do you have open? If you have 4 windows playing FMVs that's gonna slow stuff down. I also can't believe the custom mod you have going on is helping either.

The 516mb is just for macrumors to reply here. No others tabs. Even 516 is a lot.

And I have no custom mod. Bought mac mini 1.66ghz stock, 60gb hd, and cd burner. Upgraded to 2gb of ram in the store the day I baught it so its max now. No custom anything. All stock except for the ram. And even that was done by apple and not me.

So what custom are you referring to??

ivnj said:

The 516mb is just for macrumors to reply here. No others tabs. Even 516 is a lot.

And I have no custom mod. Bought mac mini 1.66ghz stock, 60gb hd, and cd burner. Upgraded to 2gb of ram in the store the day I baught it so its max now. No custom anything. All stock except for the ram. And even that was done by apple and not me.

So what custom are you referring to??

Click to expand...

There appears to be a custom OS modifier (your icon highlighter is a tiny power icon) underlying your system.

The other thing you could do is obviously make sure you update all your software to the most up to date versions, and also ensure that you have plenty of free space on your HD drive.