Saturday, April 25, 2009

KTWV 10 Issue 04: My iMac died, Viva la Mac Mini!

(Also posted on my Seventh Heaven and Jacob's Blogs.)

My 10 year old iMac finally died. I tried to revive it. Failed.

I went back to my older macs, the Performa 6400 and tried to use that, but it was tooooo slooow.

I decided to splurge and get a new Mac.

I have a perfectly good Samsung SyncMaster 900 SL Monitor. I have many USB Keyboards and Mice, all in good condition. I have USB headphones, a dlink wireless USB adaptor, a La Cie Firewire / USB DVD / CD station, so I decided to buy the Mac Mini.



A difficult decision whether to buy the basic version mac Mini costing Euro 599 with a 120 GB Hard Disk or a 320 GB Hard Disk with 2 GB of memory.

As most of my work will be network computing, the extra hard disk was not important. Also I have many hard disks lying around, from 1 GB up to 60 GB.

I checked the memory prices and found that a 1 GB memory costs just Euro 30 while a 3 GB costs just Euro 60. I will have to determine whether it is user installable and then upgrade. So I spent just Euro 599.

Considering I got the new Leopard system, which costs Euro 128 and also the latest iLife software, which costs Euro 78, Thew Mac Mini actually cost me just Euro 400. Foor a 2 GHZ Core 2 Duo, with a 8 x Superdrive station which is a DVD±R, DL DVD±RW / CD RW, and with a NVDIDIA GeForce 9400M video card with 128 main memory with a DDR3 SDRAM, etc., etc., this must be one of the best buys that I have made in a decade.

On my way to the office I picked up Annikki from home to drop her at church. She was amazed to see the size of my new computer - 16.5 cm by 16.5 cm by 5 cm.

The whole computer set up was done in less than an hour, upgraded to the latest system and it is working just fine. The speaker system is a bit tinny, but as I usually used head phones, this is not a drawback for me. The Mac Mini recognised all the hardware I connected and went to the internet without any problem through the dlink adaptor!

Sunil, who has been commenting on my attachment, sentimental, to my iMac and eMac boxes which occupy almost all the space under my office table, may be quite pleased with the size the new Mac Mini box!! :-)

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