New Intel CoreDuo Mac Mini is much slower than expected...

[IJ Reilly]

Again, this may be theoretically true, but with 512 megs of RAM he's going to hit a memory bottleneck WAY faster than whatever thoroughput limitations his HD is causing. I've got a MacBook with a 5200 RPM hard drive and I can tell you now that it's lightning fast. I'm sure plenty of other people own Minis that are similarly quick. I'm also sure that the majority of them have upgraded their RAM from stock. A 5200RPM hard drive is simply not going to be the root cause of iTunes loading more slowly than he thinks it should. Maybe it will cause delays in track seeking, but that's about it.

Oh, no, no. A slower drive will certainly cause iTunes to load more slowly, probably measurably all other things being equal. Loading any application is a disk-intensive activity, especially with iTunes, which also has to load the music library. When I upgraded the stock 5400 RPM drive in my Cube to a 7200 RPM drive, I noticed the difference immediately.

As for "lightening fast," I don't know what that means.

 

[pixlnet]

To put it this way....I've got the same system with identical specs. The Mac Mini is still pretty quick; but the difference between 512mb ram and 1gb ram is night and day. I quickly realized this at the Apple Store. Most of the display Macs have at least 1gb ram installed. Mac OS X loves lots of RAM! But yea to have a couple apps open, then open dashboard, then switch users it takes a gig of ram to make it seemless.

 

[skunk]

As for "lightening fast," I don't know what that means.

Oh, come now, you do. It's rapid-action blonde highlights.

 

[itcheroni]

I've got the core duo with 1 gb ram and it's awesome. It doesn't have ANY of the problems you're describing. So, yes, one more vote for more ram.

 

[Agent69]

My Core Duo with 1GB of RAM runs just fine for me. Since I don't need them, I have disabled mDNS, Cups, Dashboard, and Spotlight on my Mini, so my RAM footprint might be a little bit lighter than some people. (NOTE: I am NOT saying that Dashboard and Spotlight are bad; just that I don't need them.)

If I had 2GB of RAM, I would probably create a RAM Disk and use it as the cache folder for Firefox.

 

[VoodooDaddy]

Mini has been used off and on since this morning. Only things that have been run are Firefox, Safari, iTunes, Quicktime, printed a few pages, Mail, Preview, and left activity monitor on. None of these things have been run extensively or even at the same time.

Pages in/out right now is 72,519/47,210.

I do however get a nice ripple effect when I add widgets. Havent seen alot, if any, beachballing since Ive been on. (which has been only a little, been at work)