A couple of questions about a brand new install of Lion

[Vulkan]

I just ordered a Mac Mini 2.3Ghz i5 and there are a couple of questions I have about Lion and how to do a clean install.

First things first. How does this machine perform with Lion and 8GB of Ram? Will it be sluggish or will it perform well?

Second of all, the computer I am getting, I will switch the original 500GB 5400RPM drive for a 500GB 7200 RPM drive. Since Lion doesnt come in media anymore, how am I supposed to do this? Should I get a torrent with the lion media itself or do I have to buy another version...

 

[TheAppleSource]

It looks like your second point has been lost somewhere along the way, but to answer your first question, 8GB of RAM should be absolutely plenty. Lion should run exceedingly smoothly with that amount of RAM. Of course, it will depend on what applications you intend on running, and for things like video editing and photo editing (quite intensive stuff anyway), then the more RAM, the better.

 

[Vulkan]

It looks like your second point has been lost somewhere along the way, but to answer your first question, 8GB of RAM should be absolutely plenty. Lion should run exceedingly smoothly with that amount of RAM. Of course, it will depend on what applications you intent on running, and for things like video editing and photo editing (quite intensive stuff anyway), then the more RAM, the better.

Thanks for that answer I dont know what happend to that 2nd part of the question, but I fixed it so if you can chip into that one too it would be great =)

 

[Comeagain?]

You can move in installer application onto a thumb drive after downloading it. (if you have a large enough drive) and then run the installer from the thumb crave after you replace the drive.

 

[Cougarcat]

You don't need to do anything. Your Mac Mini has Lion Recovery in its firmware. When you stick in your blank drive and boot for the first time, it'll download and install Lion after you've selected your Wifi network.

See: Lion Recovery for more info.

 

[TheAppleSource]

I'm not entirely sure of the legal ramifications of the following, but given that essentially all you're doing is swapping data from one hard drive to another, I see no problem with it.

This article gives some information about one way of doing what you're aiming for. Another way, I imagine, would be to boot into the recovery partition (hold R, I think, while booting up) and then "recover" to your new hard drive (if you have it partitioned as JHFS+ and plugged in).

I also assume that restoring from a Time Machine backup to the new hard drive would also work.

 

[Vulkan]

I'm not entirely sure of the legal ramifications of the following, but given that essentially all you're doing is swapping data from one hard drive to another, I see no problem with it.

Well legally as we bought a new computer from apple, we are entitled to a license for the OS. So the media that we are getting from a Torrent is not an illegal acquisition, since we already own a license.

But...

This article gives some information about one way of doing what you're aiming for. Another way, I imagine, would be to boot into the recovery partition (hold R, I think, while booting up) and then "recover" to your new hard drive (if you have it partitioned as JHFS+ and plugged in).

If the above suggestion works, then I wouldnt have to do it. So does this Recovery partition exists on a ROM on the Mini or is it on the other (the 5400rpm) HDD?

I also assume that restoring from a Time Machine backup to the new hard drive would also work.

This would technically work, but I would have to do a time machine backup of Lion 1st.