Win on an '09 Mini?

[camardelle]

Running El Capitan without issue...two 500 gig drives. Love the system but I'm not sure if it'll run windows.

Any thoughts?

Is it difficult to install?

How do you bring it up? Is there an icon to click like Pages?

Not a lot I know at the moment. Thanks in advance for the help.

 

[Boyd01]

You can use a built-in Apple feature called "Bootcamp" to boot your Mac directly into Windows. When you do it this way, your Mac actually becomes a Windows machine until you re-boot it into MacOS.

https://support.apple.com/boot-camp

Or you can also use one of several products such as Parallels to run Windows alongside MacOS in a virtual machine. Of course, you will need to purchase a copy of Windows at minimum, and possibly also Parallels or similar software if you want to run Windows and MacOS concurrently.

I think your 2009 Mini is a Core2Duo machine, isn't it? I ran Windows for awhile on my 2008 15" MacBook Pro which was a 2.4ghz Core2Duo with 4gb RAM. Performance was best when using the Bootcamp option and it was also more stable. But Parallels was convenient since I could copy/paste between Windows and Mac Applications. But frankly, I was never happy wit the performance either way, and it made my laptop get almost too hot to touch.

Also, if you want to use both Bootcamp and Parallels, Microsoft considers that TWO separate computers and will complain about licensing/activation. Now my experience was with Windows XP so maybe things are better with newer versions of Windows?

IMO, unless you already have a copy of Windows laying around, it's not worth the effort.

 

[leo-tech]

In order to run Windows in VM under either Parallels or VirtualBox you would need 8gb memory (RAM), at least.

So, it seems BootCamp is your only option.

 

[camardelle]

I’m thinking I might just pick up an inexpensive windows machine should I go with my project. Thanks for your input. It is appreciated.

 

[dogslobber]

Running El Capitan without issue...two 500 gig drives. Love the system but I'm not sure if it'll run windows.

Any thoughts?

Is it difficult to install?

How do you bring it up? Is there an icon to click like Pages?

Not a lot I know at the moment. Thanks in advance for the help.

I run Windows 10 without activation on a 2009 Mini. It was a simple install when you have downloaded the appropriate drivers from the BootCamp webpage. The hardest part was getting the internal speaker to work as it wasn't enabled after my install.

 

[Project Alice]

I have a 2009 I use as my HTPC, with high sierra. Although I was experimenting with it for awhile because my TVs overscan sucks and so does Apple's ever since they removed the overscan slider.
I installed ONLY Windows 10 on it because nvidia control panel offers lots of options like overscan fixing. Anyways, yes Windows runs great on there. Especially with 8GB of ram.

 

[BigRed1]

I have a 2009 I use as my HTPC, with high sierra. Although I was experimenting with it for awhile because my TVs overscan sucks and so does Apple's ever since they removed the overscan slider.
I installed ONLY Windows 10 on it because nvidia control panel offers lots of options like overscan fixing. Anyways, yes Windows runs great on there. Especially with 8GB of ram.

How is high Sierra running on there? I’m assuming you used one of those spoofing scripts to install it? I’d love to be able to get the most recent version of Logic running on my ‘09.

 

[dogslobber]

I have a 2009 I use as my HTPC, with high sierra. Although I was experimenting with it for awhile because my TVs overscan sucks and so does Apple's ever since they removed the overscan slider.
I installed ONLY Windows 10 on it because nvidia control panel offers lots of options like overscan fixing. Anyways, yes Windows runs great on there. Especially with 8GB of ram.

Agree. Win10 runs superbly on an 8GB 2009 Mini here too. I have a PC HD OTA USB dongle which works really nicely as it's not Mac compatible.

 

[Project Alice]

How is high Sierra running on there? I’m assuming you used one of those spoofing scripts to install it? I’d love to be able to get the most recent version of Logic running on my ‘09.

You use this.
http://dosdude1.com/highsierra/