This evening I found some minutes to pimp my Mac mini. Actually, there is not a lot of things I am doing with it. iTunes, watching DVDs and sometimes doing some movie stuff with our DV camcorder. However, after the upgrade of my Tablet PC some weeks ago [1], two 512 MB S0 DDR-2 66z MHz modules have been left over. Lucky for me it's exactly what the Mac mini likes...
Sounds easy, somebody told me, you just have to open the case and put the memory on the left side of the chassis. I also got a link including how to open the chassis [2]. Yeah! This sounds not too hard since BtK did this also a long time ago [3]. To cut a long story short, I search for a putty knife and started opening the box.
The whole process does not take too long. In the very beginning you start carefully but soon you get a feeling for it. However, after opening the case, I was looking for the memory module... nothing on the left, nothing on the right... no memory modules on the front or in the back. Still impressed of the size of the components, I started to gather some tools for the following surgery. This included
- still the putty knife
- a small Phillips screwdriver
- a Maglite flashlight
- a small gripper
Actually there are four screws of get rid of located on the four corners of the board.
The only problem actually was the antenna on the tight upper corner. I tried some time to reach the screw, however the screw and the access hole are straight under the antenna. So nothing else was left than removing the antenna. This is necessary anyway since this part of the Mac mini has to be flipped over later during the surgery. Actually, this is quite simple: just press the black grippers right below the antenna. The attached spring lifts the antenna a bit so you can remove it.
A second more or less critical point is a small connector to the main board in front of the Mac mini. This has to be removed before you can flip the black plastic case which includes the DVD drive and the HDD. this connector should not be forgotten whilst closing the case alter as I almost did.
The memory then is located in the left side of the board. It takes some brain to go there. Since the mini was running for a while I took this chance tom remove some dust from the fan and from the cooling elements.
After exchanging the two memory modules everything I had to do was putting all the parts together. The larger of the four screws has to go the front right corner, and not to forget the tiny plug as I almost did. Connecting monitor, power, mouse (a black Microsoft Wheel Mouse Optical USB) and the iPod. And...
Happy about the fact, my Mac mini now runs with 1 GB of RAM instead of 512 MB, I've learned two lessons:
- The memory on a Intel CPU-based Mac mini is on the last place you would look for.
- Check MSN Search next time before experimenting with hardware since somebody probably has done this before [4].
[1] http://blog.aheil.de/WindowsVistaVsM400.aspx
[2] http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/editors/2005/01/...
[3] http://www.schrankmonster.de/...
[4] http://www.methodshop.com/gadgets/tutorials/macmini-ram/