New Base Mini Spinning Beach Ball

[foranor]

If there is one thing i cant stand with computers, it's lag, so imagine jumping on the Mac Mini band-wagon after 20+ years with a PC . Initially, the 2GB of ram was just fine. Then the beach ball appeared so I upgraded to 4GB. Performance improved initially, then, yep - beach ball!

Called Apple tech support and they guided me through "Permissions." It lasted about a week. Called ATS again and was basically told to delete programs I'm not using to free up memory. Right. So I use itunes with about 300 apps, 1100 photos & 1GB of music on a 500 Gig HDD spinning at 5400rpm, shared across 3 devices (iphone, itouch, ipad2). Primarily used to surf the web. A lot. Touching on 120hrs per week.

At 8GB I was getting the beach ball effect and just today, I upgraded to 16GB of ram and the first thing it did, before anything else, was the beach ball.
To say that I am terribly unimpressed with this POS would be an understatement. I am open to suggestions on improving performance before I dump it and go back to a PC.

It would help to know what version of Mac OS X you are running exactly, what machine you have with which specs.
Since you're not the Threadopener,...

 

[GGJstudios]

It would help to know what version of Mac OS X you are running exactly, what machine you have with which specs.
Since you're not the Threadopener,...

They said they have a Mid-2011 Mac mini, which shipped with Lion.

 

[foranor]

They said they have a Mid-2011 Mac mini, which shipped with Lion.

Missed his post having a title, sorry.

 

[FrankHahn]

Did you get the beach ball only from Safari? If so, one of the possible causes might be your network connection. Did you connect your mini wirelessly? I noticed sometime ago that the new Macs like wireless connection more than the wired one.

I also noticed the slowness of Safari when I first got my new Mac last year on a wired network with a Time Capsule as the router. When I went wireless, Safari became normal.

 

[Walt449]

2011 Mac Mini Specs

Here are my spec's:
Mac os x
2.5ghz core i5
Mid 2011
16GB 1333mhz DDR3
AMD Radeon HD 6630M 256MB (256? That's all?)
Software: OSX lion 10.7.4 (11ES3)

The mini is connected wirelessly. I get lag in Safari, Chrome & Firefox.
Thank-you in advance
Walt

 

[rodrigomarrafao]

Just wanted to update this thread with results after upgrading my RAM to 8GB.

Night and day.

No beach balls, fast, responsive. Just a world of difference.

Anyone who is slightly disappointed with their base Mini's performance out of the box....UPGRADE to 8GB RAM. It's easy to install, cheap (~$40 on Amazon) and dramatically changes the performance.

Thanks. for the help/suggestions.

Same here. 2gb just won't cut it. Apple is insane not shipping Mini with 4gb.