Very impressed with mac mini speed

I have a 1.42 mini with 1gb ram and everything else stock, and let me tell you, this sucker is FAST! Take a look at the screeny. All that running, and still faster than my p4 HT system. Yes, I said faster, smoother, and just plain better.

Edit: ya, i guess i cant upload tiffs. But i have every program running! :ninja:

Glad you like your mini. Now its time to upgrade to an imac G5 20"

The Mini is amazingly fast for it's size and G4 CPU. As long as you give it a lot of RAM it does pretty well. The Internal HDD holds it back a bit but that can be taken care of.

They are pretty impressive, but don't be surprised if you end up wanting something faster, I know I do.

ya, last night i was already looking at the powermac g5's

I'm not so impressed

A day or so after I set up my Mini last week I was importing some photos into iPhoto to try it out. In the meantime I decided to kill some time with Marble Blast. However, even with 1GB of RAM I found some definite lags and hang-ups while playing the game. I wonder if this was a result of the 32MB VRAM?

Last evening I was simply opening Mail, I believe, and I already had Safari open plus I have Fast Dial-Up and Internet Call Director programs running in the background all the time. Although the latter 2 programs are very basic and shouldn't be memory hogs, Mail took nearly 30 seconds to open and switching to other windows was also very slow. These lags were annoying me greatly - I bought extra RAM to avoid these things!!

There have been a few other instances where I have been doing non graphic-intensive stuff where lags and hang-ups occur that I believe shouldn't with a maxed-out Mini. My old 256 MB RAM, 64MB VRAM, Windows 98, 850MHz machine had hang-ups like these, but should a Mini with so much more speed and memory? This is why I'm wondering how crappy 512MB RAM must be on the Mini.

But the other possibility is that perhaps my RAM is faulty; it's Apple RAM that was installed with my order. I don't know what else it could be. Any thoughts?

An apology ...

... for scaring away any potential switchers to the Mini, and for insulting any current/waiting Mini owners! I found out that the "Fast Dial-Up" program provided by my ISP (Telus) was an incredible processor speed and memory hog (it also liked to automatically and annoyingly change Safari settings that I had specified to only be changed manually). Once I deleted it I noticed an incredible boost in overall performance. To really test this out, I decided to open EVERY program in my dock (inc. all iLife applications and Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) and upon doing this I still had about 256MB free! And there was very little lag when working in one of those programs with all others still open.

So yes, I realize only now that the Mini IS a rather excellent machine when maxed-out with 1GB RAM, and so with embarrassment I take back the rants of my previous post.

As for you potential switchers, I'm growing to really like my Mini (my first Mac, BTW), and any problems I've encountered have NOTHING to do with the Mac or the provided software, but rather with the odd third-party program that doesn't like to install properly. But I eventually find ways around these issues too thanks to the many Mac-wise minds here on this forum.

So again, thanks to fellow forum members and I apologize again for getting so carried away.

Super glad that you cleared it up In fact, that's one heck of an advocacy. I feel proud to be a mini owner now, thanks for making my day! (... or night, here)

Yeah no kidding, thanks for posting that!