The Final Upgrade
August 28th, 2007Thanks to a wonderful deal on RAM on Newegg, I’ve been able to perform the final RAM upgrade on my li’l Mac Mini, bumping the machine up to its limit of 2GB. A couple of gigabytes of memory on the Mac mean much more than the equivalent in the Windows world, where a lot of juice is required in powering the operating system itself. This final upgrade would actually imply memory only, for I’m still considering a larger hard drive - although on second thought, external storage would be a much more cost-effective option.
In contrast to the first time that I hesitatingly pried open the Mac Mini shell to switch the first DIMM of memory about a year ago, the endeavor this time was much smoother and faster, taking me only about five minutes between power cycles. If you don’t already know, the Mac Mini sports a very compact and streamlined design with no external screws. The casing is held in place by internal plastic tabs, which need to be bent inward carefully along three edges with a thin tool (a putty knife is ideal), in order to be removed. If you’re looking for a more detailed tutorial for doing this yourself, check this out.
While a gigabyte of memory has been sufficient for running applications, the extra memory should come in very handy while running Windows on the Mac in BootCamp, or via virtualization in VmWare Fusion (which by the way, I recommended over Parallels).
