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Thanks to Newegg and an unusual run of sobriety, Athena (my Mac Mini) has been squirted with pimp juice.
The internal hdd was an 80g/5400rpm, now 250g/7200rpm. Dunno how warm it'll get - I'll have to remember to check after tonight's photoshop session. The OEM drive was carbon copy cloned to the new disk using a cheap USB enclosure.
Ram has gone from the default 2x512 modules to 2x2g modules. While the OS sees the full four, the hardware can only address a hair over three. I did some extensive reading on this and after a price comparison, figured the 10-15% performance increase I'll be getting from a matched set will give me ridiculously more value than the half shot of whiskey I'd buy with money saved by buying 1g and 2g modules.
Anyone who tells you all you need to pop a Mini is a putty knife is either lying or using a metal one. The plastic putty knives I bought through Amazon are pretty thick (somewhere between a sixteenth and an eighth of an inch) - I started the pry-open using the bottle opener on my swiss army knife and then, once I'd opened a big enough gap, used the putty knife to wodge it open the rest of the way. This procedure used two putty knives and worked exceptionally well. One of the case tabs got bent a bit, but otherwise... the thing was harder to put back together than it was to take apart.
Tools note : There was no way in hell the screw bits on my swiss army knife would have fit into the phillips heads in the Mini. A regular screwdriver (I have a few, including a big honkin' short sword of a driver clearly designed with home defense applications in mind) doesn't cut it. Fortunately I'd kept the blue-handled long-necked driver that had been included with the processor upgrade I'd bought for one of my G4s from Small Dog. It's magnetized, and the head is the right size to get the job done. This upgrade would have been a miserable pain in the ass without that little piece of kit.
Bit of advice : If some piece of kit you buy comes with tools included, don't throw the tools away! Screwdrivers, allen keys, extra screws, wingnuts, bubblewrap... trust me. Some day, you'll need 'em.
Three gigs of ram!
I CAN RUN PHOTOSHOP AND A WEB BROWSER. TWO, EVEN!
I may die.
Total price : ~$160 with shipping. ~$80 for the drive, ~$18 for the enclosure, ~18$/module for the ram. $0.70/each for the putty knives. Free shipping for Amazon and around $20 for FedEx second day for the Newegg bits.
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