Thank you for all the info and your time, BS. Man you sound like the one everyone calls when their computer doesn't work right. My kind of people. My mom calls me when her computer doesn't work and scratches her head when I fix it in seconds. Like I just performed voodoo.
Sort of what a lot of the folks on the Early Intel Macs and PowerPC Macs forums do is not only helping more people get more use out of their older Macs, but also to uncover new ways of bringing new utility to those Macs. We’re all on team “re-use/upcycle” and less “disposal/recycle” here.
I'm more knowledgeable with PCs. Unfortunately. How easy is it to do the patches from dosdude? I imagine I'll have to watch some YouTube videos for that.
The OS patching utilities by dosdude1 are pretty straightforward and similar in design. One caveat you’ll need, however, is access to a Mac with a working operating system (which, even a 2009 Mac mini with a working version of, say, Snow Leopard, should be sufficient).
Since you have a 2009 Mac mini but haven’t been able to get Snow Leopard on there, my guess is you might have tried to install from one of the OEM grey DVDs. Unless the DVD is, literally, the one which shipped with that specific Mac mini, then this will almost never work out. Instead, grab and burn an ISO of the
retail install DVD (here, 10.6.7) for Snow Leopard, followed, post-install, by going through and letting Software Update bring everything up to to 10.6.8 with all security updates.
You’ll also need an external USB flash drive of, at least, 8GB to clone that ISO (I only have a 16GB drive for stuff like this, but all the installers have run just under 8GB). The patcher utility will clone the OS, with patches included for your model, onto that USB stick, which will then be used to boot from it and to install the OS on your internal drive.
Or, if you‘re feeling really crafty, you could use Disk Utility (namely, the Disk Utility accessible from the patched installer) to create a temporary installer partition for the “end” of the internal drive and install the patched OS to a second, or “middle” partition you also create.
You’ll also want to decide whether to keep both the existing OS already on your internal drive and have a second partition for the patched OS, or whether you want
just the patched OS to be the
only one on your Mac mini.
As a safe step, if you plan to take the “one OS on my Mac mini” route, you’ll want to use the legacy version of
Carbon Copy Cloner 3.4.7 (which works fine on Snow Leopard and earlier, but not so much for later OS X/macOS builds) to back up what you currently have on there, pre-installation, in case you need to come back to it for any reason (this is where having the backup on an old, internal HDD you removed, in place for a new SSD, comes in handy).
[Note: if you plan to clone stuff on OS X/macOS from after Snow Leopard, you’re gonna need to grab the shareware version of Carbon Copy Cloner 5.x (as Apple completely re-engineered both GUID/GPT partition mapping from Lion onward, and added APFS partitioning as the successor/default over HFS+ partitioning beginning with High Sierra). Carbon Copy Cloner 3.4.7 isn’t equipped to deal with these changes.]
I'm sure I can do the SSD swap and the memory upgrade. That's more of my cup. Sounds expensive though so I'll have to hold off until I get some funds allocated for that. I just wanna get it working like it did in 2009. At the moment.
It shouldn’t be
too bad nowadays. RAM for the early/late 2009 Mac minis are PC3-8500 DDR3 SO-DIMMs at 1066MHz. Two 4GB sticks are what will top it off. You might even find someone selling used 2x4GB SO-DIMMs locally for a good bargain.
The 2.5-inch SATA SSDs have really, really come down in price from even just five years ago (and positively so from when I bought my first SSD back in 2011, when a 64GB SSD ran about CAD$100!). For best performance, keep your eye out for SSD models which, explicitly, have an onboard DRAM cache. This makes random reads and writes a lot quicker and works to allow the drive controller within the SSD to better allocate and manage wear-levelling on the SSD’s NANDs. In plain English: DRAM has less bottlenecking.
DRAM-cache SSD models are, usually, at least a step up from basement/entry SSDs within a brand’s line (a good example: WD’s Green SSD line, their entry-level, lacks an DRAM cache, but their WD Blue and WD Red SATA SSDs have them). I put a 500GB WD Blue SSD in my 2008 MBP when I set it up in 2021 (it has both Snow Leopard 10.6.8 and a dosdude1-patched High Sierra 10.13.6), and it has done very well.
