Is the mac mini supposed to be this SLOW?

[Abstract]

Oh my, the amount of mis-information in this thread is astonishing.

Just go to OWC like people have recommended. There's no point going through all this trouble to save $50. Its not like your new 1GB stick of RAM actually works. Its just a waste of money.

And you don't need 1GB of RAM. I have a 1GHz PB, which is slower than your Mac Mini. I had 512MB of RAM (2 x 256MB sticks) in it for 15 months, and it ran great. The only reason I needed to get a 1GB stick is because I needed more RAM than you. Why? Because I've had iTunes, Safari and Firefox (with about 8 Tabs open in each browser), Mail, Word, Excel, and 4 or 5 PDF documents that were between 10 to 50 pages all open at the same time.

That's a lot of large PDFs. That's a lot of websites. I did this regularly, as I was doing my Masters.

Now I'm doing a PhD, and there will be many occasions where I'll need to have many massive PDF documents and research websites open. You don't. I had 512MB on a system slower than the Mac Mini, and it ran great when I wasn't doing craploads of research. Get 512MB.

If you get 1GB, it would be nice, but it would be like getting a Porsche just to drive to the grocery store.

 

[Jovian9]

Get rid of Konfabulator on that machine. I had to stop using it on a 17" 1.33GHz PB with 1GB RAM b/c it was a hog.

 

[plinden]

My iBook is slower (according to Ghz rating) but it is quicker than my 1.6 GHz Centino laptop (which is great by the way). It is either the memory issue or something else is seriously wrong.

Go to blackviper.com and use his recommended services list to disable nonessential services. It didn't make a huge noticeable difference with normal usage, but it frees up some CPU and RAM. It halved the time needed to compile my Java code. Something (indexing service perhaps?) was making file access really slow.

 

[mrzeve]

No ones answered my question about the beep on system boot with the 1gb stick.

Does that mean the stick is Incompatible or DEAD?

 

[Hemingray]

No ones answered my question about the beep on system boot with the 1gb stick.

Does that mean the stick is Incompatible or DEAD?

Well, according to Tek-Tips, one beep means no RAM was installed or detected. Sounds like it's dead to me, or else you would have heard two or more beeps. But I don't know for a fact.

 

[mrzeve]

Will 512mb be sufficient to run Tiger?

And I dont want Tiger to "just work" like Apple states.

I want to be able to run iPhoto and iMovie in tiger with my widgets going without having to see all these beach balls.

 

[Blackheart]

Will 512mb be sufficient to run Tiger?

And I dont want Tiger to "just work" like Apple states.

I want to be able to run iPhoto and iMovie in tiger with my widgets going without having to see all these beach balls.

You're not going to get much of an answer. Tiger isn't even publicly out yet.

 

[pizzach]

I'm on a 400Mhz G4 processor and the speed isn't too shabby on Mac OS X. Of course, I have 1Gb of RAM. 😎 So the slogan goes, "RAM is power".

 

[dollystereo]

READ MY OTHER POST

COME ON, the ram you bought doesnt fit your mac mini, thats why the beap!!!!
Go and change your 1gb Pc3200 ram for a 1gb pc 2700 ram, and stop crying, AND TIGER WILL RUN ON YOUR MACHINE!!!! (not core video or image) the radeon 9200 is the problem.

Dont ask more, get 1gb of your MACs Minis ram
http://www.apple.com/macmini/specs.html ok?????

Configurations
1.25GHz Mac mini
1.42GHz Mac mini

Model
M9686LL/A
M9687LL/A

Processor
1.25GHz PowerPC G4
1.42GHz PowerPC G4

Memory
256MB of PC2700 (333MHz) DDR SDRAM, supports up to 1GB

And the man thats telling you to get 768!!!! is IMPOSSIBLE
only one slot.

that means 256, 512 or 1gb!!! (no 2 gb dims!)

OK, thats all.

 

[mrzeve]

The current 256mb stick in my mac mini, and others, is pc3200....not 2700

and if you would look it up the reason im asking about the computer beeping is because i want to know if 1 beep could mean my chip is DEAD not incompatible.

 

[Blackheart]

COME ON, the ram you bought doesnt fit your mac mini, thats why the beap!!!!
Go and change your 1gb Pc3200 ram for a 1gb pc 2700 ram, and stop crying, AND TIGER WILL RUN ON YOUR MACHINE!!!! (not core video or image) the radeon 9200 is the problem.

You, sir, are incorrect. PC3200 RAM will work in a Mac Mini the same as PC2700 RAM. They are not different sizes. The only catch is that the PC3200 RAM speed will be pared down to PC2700 because that's the speed of the Mac Mini bus.

mrzeve,

I'm guessing that the RAM you have is bad.

 

[hob]

One thing to keep your eye on is Hard Disk Capacity... I'm kicking myself now for only getting a 40GB hard disk... I'm having to take all my music off my internal, and onto the external drive I bought because the system is unbearably slow when trying to run it with less than 1GB hard-disk space... One day soon I'll buy a powermac and it'll all be happy again 🙂