2009 Mac Mini Bearable with CS5?

[sammyman]

What will it take to make a 2009 Mac Mini bearable with CS5? Currently, I have 320gb HDD 7200rpm drive with 4GB of RAM. I would like to hold off with purchasing an iMac 27" until light peak or larger internal HDD's and SSD become available. So what can I do to make the Mac Mini useable so my wife can get by for the meantime?

She does about 30 weddings a year, and each wedding is about 12-16GB. She processes each picture with actions on the mini.

Any suggestions?

 

[mjsmke]

Your Mac Mini will run CS5 fine, but not fast. More RAM would be ideal but if your planning on buying the iMac soon it may not be worth spending much money on the mini.

 

[FourCandles]

I have a similar machine as the OP, with the stock 5400rpm drive. It runs PS CS5 and Lightroom 3 fine for me, including some big TIFF scans of old medium format negs I'm restoring.

But I do have a fast FW800 external drive as a scratch disk/Camera RAW cache, and all the images on other FW800 external drives.