Mac Mini

“Dear Mr Jobs,

When I said “Your work here was done”, in my previous post about my iPhone, I may have been telling porkies, as I still had a Windows machine in the house, however you’ll be glad to know, that I’ve done the right thing, and replaced it with a Mac Mini. Sorry for the porkie, and I am now 100% Apple.

Your ever faithful disciple

Darren.”

As you can probably tell from the above, I’ve replaced my last remaining Windows machine with a Mac Mini (Really ? No sh1t Sherlock). To be honest I’ve been toying with the idea since getting the MacBooks last year, as essentially all the Windows machine did was act as a server. It was my media server, my iTunes server, my torrent downloading machine (all legal of course) and a way of dialling into my network from the outside world using remote desktop and port forwarding.

As you can probably suss from my ted post, I spent a little time and ensured that I could still carry out the same functions on the Mac.

I’m using PS3 Media Server to stream to my PS3′s and Xbox,I’m using a uTorrents as my torrent client,iTunes (obviously) for my iTunes server and finally VNC to dial it.

All these pieces of software are available cross platform, so all is good.

The Mac Mini turned up on Monday (unboxing below). The thing that got me about this was just how small the Mac Mini actually is, imagine stacking 4/5 CD cases onto of each other, and that it !

This this is silent, so compact, so tidy, and takes up no room whatsoever !.

As this is just going to be used for the same purpose the Windows machine was, I didn’t really need a high spec, as the Dell I was replacing was only a 2Gb Core 2 Duo, with 2Gb of Ram.

I went for the below, which to be honest it more than adequate for what I need.

• 2.26GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
• 2GB memory
• 160GB hard drive¹
• 8x double-layer SuperDrive
• NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics
• Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Now unlike the iMac, this doesn’t come with a mouse or keyboard, these are optional, however I had a spare set kicking around. The Mac Mini does have an internal speaker (which to be honest I was a little shocked at, as this device is so small. You do however have the option of connecting external speakers via the 3.5mm jack plug at the back.

The Video out connections are both the Mini DVI and the Mini Displayport adapters, allowing you to connect this to VGA, DVI and HDMI, however you only get a Mini DVI to DVI connecter included.

As with all my apple equipment, I switched it on, entered my details, and done !

This has been the final piece is a very expensive jigsaw, however my household is completely Mac, Goodbye Windows, I hope I never have to use you again ! (well, I do have to use it every day at work…but I don’t really have a choice in that)

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Windows 7 Beta, a couple of weeks in.

I’ve now been using windows 7 beta on my spare machine for a couple of weeks, and it pains me to say, I’m impressed.  It’s rock solid, and not fallen over once.

The machine I’m running it on is a Dell Vostro 220 that I bought toward the end of last year.

The Spec is as follows

2Ghz Core 2 Duo

2Gb Ram

2 x 150Gb Sata Hard Drives

ATI 3450 256Mb Dedicated Graphics

Onboard sound

All driver I’m using are in inbuilt Windows drivers, apart from the ATI drivers which are beta.

I’m currently running, Tversity, Utorrent, MKV2VOB, Imgburn, Epson CDprint. Now granted I’m not really pushing it, well apart from the Vob encoding, and the Tversity encoding, but it’s worked flawlessly since I installed it on the 21st Jan 2009.

Taking the above into consideration, I decided to ghost my hard drive on my main gaming PC, and install it on the main drive, big mistake !

Now I will be honest, my machine isn’t the best example of a standard machine, as I’ve had a number of issues with it. There is nothing phyically wrong with it, hardware wise, it’s just have had some (Microsoft hates ATI, and ATI can’t write drivers for toffee issues)

The spec is as follows

AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ Dual Core CPU
4GB DDR2 5400 OCZ Memory
Asus M2R32-MVP SB600 chipset Motherboard
1 x Pioneer 212 DVD-Multi Drive
1 x WD 500Gb 7200 Hard Drive
2 x WB 250GB 7200 Hard Drive
ATI 2900HD 1Gb Video Card

Now the initial problems I had were with the installation, As I have a SATA DVD drive the AHCI doesn’t like working, however I was able to crowbar the operating system on, this worked ok, however the system paused every couple of seconds, and the hard drive light lit up like a Christmas tree.

So based on this, I put the hard drives into IDE Native mode, and reinstalled, and this fixed the pausing problem.

Driver support….well apart from ATI, NONE ! I know the software is in beta stages, but Geeez, didn’t manufacturers learn thier lesson from the Vista release, I remember waiting for months for Soundblaster to release stable drivers, I ended up taking my XFI card out and using the onboard card instead.

The ATI drivers were Video only, so I have no motherboard drivers, which mean much slowness. I attempted to use the Vista drivers, nope, forget it, just hung. I found that any vista drivers I tried, just made the system hang (fair enough, they ain’t for Windows 7)

I tried to run a few games with the current machine, and they run bad. If they would run at all, they were slow and choppy.

Now I do understand, that the majority of the issues are driver related, so I’ll keep an eye on these and retest at a later date.

As an operating system, I actually can’t wait for it to come out, it’s what Vista should have, and hopefully everybody will forget Vista even happened (kinda like Windows ME).

I like the way the Widgets are no longer on the windows sidebar, I love the preview Window when you scroll over the bottom bar, like the management of the taskbar menu.

Will update when more drivers are available, but at the moment a 2 thumbs up

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