Adding memory to Mac Mini Intel

ardenlester00 said:

Hello,

I just added 10.6.8 to my 10.5.8 on my Mini Intel (2 ghz).

Suddenly I get the colored wheel all the time. I try to keep the system "clean" with Disk Warrior and iDefrag - and that helps, but...I can't get much work done - always a "wheel spinning".

The Apple lady hinted that I may have to add memory - is that probably the reason for the wheel?

Click to expand...

There are many possible causes for beachballing, including a lack of RAM, a failing hard drive, an app or process that's hung or simply a CPU-intensive app that's busy.

To determine if you can benefit from more RAM, launch Activity Monitor and click the System Memory tab at the bottom to check your page outs. Page outs are cumulative since your last restart, so the best way to check is to restart your computer and track page outs under your normal workload (the apps, browser pages and documents you normally would have open). If your page outs are significant (say 1GB or more) under normal use, you may benefit from more RAM. If your page outs are zero or very low during normal use, you probably won't see any performance improvement from adding RAM.

Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor

In order to help you pick the right memory, we'll need to know what specific model of Mini you have.
Go to the Apple logo at the top left corner, then about this Mac. Click more info, and then you should get a window that has this information in it:

Hardware Overview:

Model Name: Mac mini
Model Identifier: Macmini3,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 3 MB
Memory: 8 GB
Bus Speed: 1.07 GHz


All we need is the model identifier, such as the 3,1 in the case of my own Mini.