Hi all,
I got my first Mac recently, the base model mid-2011 Mini. I was quite excited after reading the reviews, and simply because I had always run PCs so this was something new. I have very grudgingly, though, had to come to the conclusion that the machine is a bit slow. Not unusable, but it just doesn't feel right and to be honest it distracts me since I am paying a premium over PCs for the purchase.
All the reviews on the machine say that it is snappy and responsive, and mine just isn't when I get down to business. Startup times are fine and so is everything else. Then I open a couple of programs and things start to go downhill. I do some fairly intensive iPhoto work, so I will let it off on that, but I would expect this sort of computer to be able to keep up with a browser, several tabs + Excel and dibbing in and out of finder and widgets. It just cannot keep up with that sort of use though. Virtual machine is a bit of a no-no I noticed as well. I get to the stage where I have to press the same button several times to get a response, and beachballs galore. I don't understand, for example, when turning the computer off I usually have to press the Apple button more than once to persuade the drop down menu to appear or why the widgets take a while to load initially. All these little annoyances add up.
Now like I said, I'm comparing my experiences with what online reviews say, but I don't know other Mac Mini owners experiences. Is it a case of what I suspect it maybe and the base model Mac Mini has far too little ram to run Lion? Activity monitor shows me that the ram is nearly maxed out even with a couple of programs running. A look at disk utility showed a healthy hard drive. On the other hand the hard drive does seem to have to work a lot by the sound of it, but that might just be all the paging it has to do again because of the lack of ram.
What do you all think? Am I expecting too much of the Mini in terms of performance? I was hoping for something which was responsive except under heavy load. I will be getting 8GB Crossair ram as soon as I have the money and hopefully my problem will be gone. It is a bit frustrating having that sense that there is a load of unlocked potential after already shelled out the money to buy the computer. Or could it be something else? Does and OSX install corrupt easily? Might I have done something silly and corrupted it as I'm new to OSX (although I've familiar with Linux, so I'm not a computer novice or anything like that).
All input would be greatly appreciated.
PS. Only minimal things have been installed on the computer like browsers, MS Office, Dropbox, VMWare, VLC etc..
