Is my Mac Mini dead on arrival, or is it something I did?
After getting my shiny new unibody Mini yesterday, I immediately/excitedly set it up and used migration assistant to port my files/apps/settings from my macbook (2006). I used an ethernet cable for this since I didn't have a 6-9 pin firewire. After a couple of hours, it was 1am but I was ready to go.
I log in and the desktop appears, everything looks good so far. Then I start by opening firefox and pages... and the best way I can describe the actual resulting performance is "Choppy." There was a lot of lag with any attempt to scroll down or move the windows. There was no smooth fluid motion like my Macbook has always had, instead the windows seemed to stiffly teleport (after a delay) to where the mouse was.
I restarted the computer in case that would make a difference. Moving windows was a little better but still choppy, loading programs was slower than I expected, and the performance wasn't even on the level of my 2006 macbook...
Disappointed, I decided to at least try World of Warcraft (yeah yeah, I know
) to see how the graphics card worked. My macbook's 64mb integrated card can only just handle it on the lowest settings, so for the Mac Mini I changed the settings to medium to high. This worked decently at first, I was amazed that there are actually detailed textures and real shadows in the game, but then weird colors started flashing on the screen and the game actually froze!
After some time I was able to command+M to get it out of full screen, but the dock and other windows weren't responding to anything. Eventually I could cancel out of the game, but the computer seemed to be suffering a lot from the ordeal. The dock actually disappeared, leaving a sort of color echo to the side of where it should've been. I had open a simple text document with some passwords on it (so I don't have to remember them), and I tried moving that and my computer simply became scrambled. It basically crashed and froze.
This is what it looked like (sensitive information blacked out). The only program open at the time was textedit. Picture was taken of the monitor by digital camera.
And so weeks of anticipating a mini update was turned into bitter disappointment in the span of 20 minutes. I have never seen anything like this on a Mac before.. my macbook has never frozen, died, or even really slowed down. Maybe I was lucky with the macbook, but I've never seen the sort of lag, and nothing's ever been scrambled... The Mac Mini's performance was pretty weak even before the crash. This seems like a catastrophic failure.
So what do you guys think the problem is... maybe the USPS dropped the box and damaged the internals? Did transferring data from the Macbook screw it up somehow? I was using a VGA monitor with the minidisplay port, did that contribute? Is the Mini just a lemon that I should send back? What should I do?
