Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

Voiding guarantees for fun and profit

So I finally gave in. My plan to "just happen to go for a visit to the Apple Store and not buy a Mac mini" failed miserably and I came home with a dinky tiny 1.42GHz G4 with an 80GB hard drive in a box which is, it has to be said, small. It's hard to figure out just how small it is until you see it in action. There are a million reviews out there which will tell you this, so I won't go into detail about such things.

Suffice to say that I now have a small box sitting like a limpet on top of my hunky great G5. With a VNC server installed (and fortunately, the Apple Remote Desktop server side which is installed with MacOS X already speaks VNC) it will happily work with just power and networking connected - just right for the project which I have in mind for it. But first I thought I'd pull a 512MB DIMM from my mostly-idle PC, which will be quite fine with the remaining half-gig, to upgrade the Mini to 512MB. There are plenty of web pages out there with instructions on how to open a Mac mini, most of which involve putty knives. Well, I don't have a putty knife, but after an hour or so of mucking about with a couple of kitchen fish slices, a random piece of thin metal and a couple of expired, edge-filed-down Irish credit cards I was in without causing any visible damage.

Exchanging the DIMM is the easy bit, but what people don't tell you is that putting it back together can be tricky too - there's a row of metal fingers on the edge of the I/O panel which have to be positioned just right as you squeeze the machine back together, or it's fish-slice time again to get the lid off and try again. Apple have confirmed that although the machine's tricky to get into, opening it up doesn't void the guarantee unless you break something by taking it to bits, which is quite reasonable.

Now that that's done, the machine happily reports 512MB at boot time and it's time to get going on part 2 of my Evil Plan for the Mac mini.