2007 Mac Mini and Windows 10...shockingly usable

[fletma]

Hi!

I’m not sure what you mean exactly by laggy, but to me running Windows 10 on this Mac Mini ”feels” to me like the difference between running Mac OS X on a power PC machine vs an Intel machine.

Douglas,

The OS itself appears to be ok - not lightening fast but no different from Windows 7. Where it is laggy is in playing video, what you can see is the video pause for a fraction of a second and then jump slightly to catch up. Same video, played by the same software on Windows 7 played perfectly.

After the upgrade I didn't reinstall and drivers, or boot camp assistant although I have not subsequently updated the graphics card driver without any impact. Was there anything you did post upgrade to get your machine working smoothly?

 

[DouglasCarroll]

You can clone the drives, either by creating an image (with Disk Utility) and restoring it into the destination drive, or via the terminal (with the dd command, for example, but this is more or less what Disk Utility uses, simply without a GUI), or some other software, for example Gparted is very good!

I've cloned disks with each of the upper suggested methods for Mac and Windows (and Linux) with success.

My understanding is that this doesn’t work for a Mac OS X drive with a Windows Boot Camp partition, I even contacted the author of “Carbon Copy Cloaner”, which is the backup solution I use, and he wrote back saying simply cloaning the hard drive with Boot Camp installed doesn’t work. I’ll do more research though....thanks for the info.

This is the kind of stuff i’m reading about....

Clone Mac with Boot Camp to a new Hard Drive - David Vielmetter

My MacBook Pro has been running out of hard disk space for some time. I'm down to less than 1GB of free space on both my Macintosh HD and the Boot Camp Windows 7 partition. So I hopped on NewEgg and got a WD Black 500GB notebook hard drive and 8GB's of RAM for $150.

davidvielmetter.com

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Douglas,

The OS itself appears to be ok - not lightening fast but no different from Windows 7. Where it is laggy is in playing video, what you can see is the video pause for a fraction of a second and then jump slightly to catch up. Same video, played by the same software on Windows 7 played perfectly.

After the upgrade I didn't reinstall and drivers, or boot camp assistant although I have not subsequently updated the graphics card driver without any impact. Was there anything you did post upgrade to get your machine working smoothly?

I’ll check out some video files this evening and post my results....

 

[DouglasCarroll]

Okay, so I went ahead and played a mp4 video file of "The Lion King" movie, the new one, and had no issues whatsoever...no lagging at all ever, and I even played it off an external USB drive. I also streamed a 720p HD video on youtube in Microsoft Edge browser and had no lagging there either, it looked and played just great.

I'm not sure what your particular issue is but it is NOT normal to see lagging when playing video on this machine under Windows 10. Do you have an upgraded CPU and memory like I posted in my first message? Are you trying to play some crazy high resolution video?

 

[BrootSys]

del

 

[Retro_011i]

I did a legacy installation Windows 10 64bit (1909) without Bootcamp and it Works fine but I still miss some drivers.
Has anyone a good istallation of the 64bit Windows 10 on the MacMini2.1?
Easy way to extract the drivers from a running systen would be by executing as admin:
dism /online /export-driver /destination:"c:\DrvBackup"
"c:\DrvBackup" should be any folder you like to store the extracted drivers.
If someone can share the extraction with me I would like to test if I get a 100% Hardware supprt in this way.
It would be a great way to solve driver installation on Macs for lazy useres 😎
Maybe would make sense to share such driver packages in a separate thread for all kind of Macs.
I know there is comertial software for driver backup but I prefer to try onboard tools first.
- 😳 sorry about my English. Its not native.

 

[DouglasCarroll]

That would be great if someone could do this to get the drivers. The ONLY thing not working properly on my Windows 10 install on my MacMini is the bluetooth, although it used to work before when Windows 7 was installed, some update killed the bluetooth.

 

[Retro_011i]

I managed to get no more issues at device manager icluding Bluetooth. Still not tested.
I did extraction of drivers and it requires 41Mb (x64 and I exchanged my Wifi card)
Don´t know how to deal with files in this forum. I´m newbie 😉.
But I guess this may be a Good and a new idea how to deal with Windows instalations on Macs, out of bootcamp.
At least I have not found before. And I hope there is no legal restriction to share such type of files.
I still need to find a way to select default boot partition from Windows, like bootcamp does.
But Windows 10 seems a up to date OS for our old MacMini. And does not feel worse than Lion were all Browsers stop support, which becomes a safety issue and is the reason I did this.
Here the Bluetooth driver extraction. Let me know if it works

 

[jdryyz]

Having recently received my old Mac mini 2006 (firmware upgraded to 2,1, 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo and 4GB RAM), I wanted to see how far I could max it out. The first thing I knew I needed to do was some house keeping. It has spent the last six years over at my father's home. All the dust accumulation was removed. It was in good physical condition otherwise.

The next thing was to install was an SSD. I went with a modestly sized spare I had lying around. No problems here. Even with the 1.5Gbps SATA bus speed, an SSD still performs better than the rotational drive it replaced. This alone makes the experience on this old Mac more pleasant. I even finally figured out what I needed to do to get Lion installed and updated. I have no Mac OS X ambition beyond that but I know going beyond Lion is possible albeit with a graphics limitation.

Next on the list was installing a Bootcamp partition and a fresh Windows 7 32bit system. No problems here either. The latest version of Bootcamp drivers that were downloaded using the Assistant is 4.x There is a very specific 4.x.x.x. version compatible with this mini I have come to find out. Doesn't look like upgrading these drivers is possible. More on that later.

So getting to the subject of this thread, I was inspired to try out the latest Windows 10 available as a free download from Microsoft. My understanding is as long as you have an activated Windows currently installed, Windows 10 will be activated also. This is why I did not attempt a fresh Windows 10 install first.

Sorry to report that my experience with Windows 10 on this mini has not been favorable. The graphics performance does not feel optimized to me. Moving windows around the screen is noticeably sluggish compared to Win 7. The GMA Windows 10 driver does appear to be rather generic. I found nothing better available. The next undesirable thing I was running into was a delay in reaching web sites. Didn't matter what browser I chose. I made sure I had no Proxy or automatic settings configured. Still, there was this delay with getting to websites. They also did not load as fast compared to Win 7.

Everything else seemed to be fine, but these two problems were enough for me to revert back to Windows 7. I do, of course, realize Win 7 is not officially supported any longer. Funny thing about that is I am still able to perform a lot of Windows updates, save for a few that refuse to install.

I am confused by what I am reading here, though. Windows 10 64 bit is able to be installed? My understanding is that even with the firmware update and a Core 2 Duo present, the OS is still stuck at 32 bits. Is this only true for the Mac OS X side? I vaguely recall that I attempted a Windows 7 64 bit install on this mini long ago and it failed. I would be intrigued to know how a 64 bit Windows can be made to work. Perhaps the key to this is the minor detail that this thread is about a 2007 Mac mini and not a 2006 Mac mini with firmware update. 🙄

Regarding the Bootcamp drivers: none are officially available for Windows 10 on this Mac mini. This is also why installing Windows 10 on top of the existing Windows 7 made sense. I do not think Windows 10 would detect all of the hardware on its own and I did not want to trying hunting down drivers.

On a related note, my fully compatible Windows 7 install does have a Bootcamp drivers problem still. The Apple Software Update crashes every single time I try to run it. Not sure what is going on here because it worked fine in the past. I have not attempted to reinstall the driver package but I doubt that would help. Seems like something is happening with the updater when it tries to contact Apple's servers.
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[Retro_011i]

Because lack of support I decided to try Windows. Previously I did some attempts on my iMac. I installed a Windows 7 successfully but I modified partitions and everything went lost. Don’t understand that two programs from same company cannot coexist. So I decided to do it without bootcamp assistant.
I keept OSX for external disk and I left internal SSD for Windows only. But it was not a straight forward installation. As MacMini does not like to boot windows from external drives I connected internal SSD with a 22pin sata cable outside of the box and started trials. Finally I had to perform a manual install deploying windows image on the SSD using the dism command after creating the partitions. Its a good method to ensure a MBR version gets installed.
After some reboots you need to look for some of missing drivers. Most of them are in the bootcamp distributions as 64bit. Others are a bit harder to find but everything can be found.
Even I upgraded my MacMini2.1 to a Intel Core 2 Duo t7600 64bits processor it cannot do miracles. Same as Lion. It feels not slower or faster, but at least the OS is now up to date and I don’t want to use it for gaming anyway.
But all this is quite fresh. So I cannot tell to much. Browsing has improved a lot by a new WIFI card which supports n, even with one single antenna.

 

[jrgl050]

I even finally figured out what I needed to do to get Lion installed and updated. I have no Mac OS X ambition beyond that but I know going beyond Lion is possible albeit with a graphics limitation.
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A PC guy that is new to MAC......I got an old (new to me) Mac mini 2006 that I've upgraded the firmware to 2,1, cpu to 2.16GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM and a 120gb SSD. It currently has MAC OS 10.6.8 Snow Leopard. What are the steps needed / is there a good guide available online for installing Lion on these machines? Thanks.

 

[ian87w]

A PC guy that is new to MAC......I got an old (new to me) Mac mini 2006 that I've upgraded the firmware to 2,1, cpu to 2.16GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM and a 120gb SSD. It currently has MAC OS 10.6.8 Snow Leopard. What are the steps needed / is there a good guide available online for installing Lion on these machines? Thanks.

I think the App Store is available on Snow leopard. See if you can simply download and upgrade to Lion via the App Store.

 

[jrgl050]

I think the App Store is available on Snow leopard. See if you can simply download and upgrade to Lion via the App Store.

Well, I decided to skip over lion and using macpostfactor was able to install mountain lion on the 2006 mac mini and with my upgrades it works great.

Now I have another project. I was able to snap up on ebay a late 2009 mac mini a1283 with a 2.53 core 2 duo because the seller had no way of plugging it in to check it out so they were selling it as parts or repair. I took a $30 chance, the mac mini did work and now I am waiting on a SSD and 8GB of memory to come in for me to install on it next week.

 

[Abdulhaq]

You don't need boot camp to support it. Install Windows 7, which your boot camp does support, and then simply let Windows 7 upgrade itself to Windows 10! The ONLY issue I have (which I already had in Windows 7) is that the internal bluetooth in the MacMini doesn't seem to be recognized properly in Windows 10 (or 7) and I cannot seem to locate proper drivers ANYWHERE that remedy this situation. I just use a usb keyboard instead of a wireless (like I do when I boot into Lion on the same machine) and there are no issues.

I like your comment " Install Windows 7, which your boot camp does support, and then simply let Windows 7 upgrade itself to Windows 10!". This is what I want to do with my mid 2011 Mac Mini.

I have a Windows 7 image USB. When I boot from the USB then Windows 7 starts installing but it does not recognize my 300 GB partition (the other 700 gb partition has my Mac OS System). It says that my 300 gb partition should be formatted in the NTFS System.

I started the Mac OS system and I tried to format this 300GB partition in Windows NTFS system but the option for Windows NTFS system appears but is greyed out and not selectable and I cannot format it in the NTFS system. Kindly help me to resolve this issue.

 

[DouglasCarroll]

So I went ahead and replaced the internal HD with a spare SSD that I had laying around and the mini is much faster than before under OS X Lion.

I haven't bothered moving the Windows 10 installation across to the new SSD yet but I would bet it would help the speed quite a bit there as well.

Incidentally, does anyone have a good recommendation for moving Windows 10 to a new hard drive using a free method? I'm not really interested in spending $50 on a utility to do this....

Thanks!