Sick to death of Mac Minis

[ibglowin]

I have bought 3 of them, no problems with any of them

Have a 1.42Ghz G4, 1.66Ghz Core Duo, and a 1.83Ghz Core Duo. All of them are on 24/7 since purchased and not a single failure of anything. If they are so unreliable then why do the Casino's in Vegas use them. There's like 10,000 of them in Vegas being used for security camera systems.

 

[bigdaddyp]

I was simply repeating what they said was their experience. It was also in comparison to other macs not Dells.

 

[Dreamkatcha]

On the subject of reliability, my Mac Mini's CPU is now running at a temperature of 93c and all it's doing is installing an application. Meanwhile I'm doing press-ups and throwing weights around to keep warm. No-one can convince me that's the sign of a sturdy, well designed system.

I really like the look of these mini Dell laptops. Seeing as this is going to be my one and only computer though I think I'd find it hard to adjust to such a small screen. I'd rather get a base unit I can connect to my 19" widescreen monitor so I can still get the best experience from watching movies.

 

[Courtaj]

Weird. Never got mine above about 70-75C even when encoding video - with the exception of the very occasional crash when exiting Word, which then seems to put the thing into some bizarre number-crunching, mobo-melting loop.

Andrew.

 

[keekl]

About two years ago when I was making my switch to macs my local repair shop had the following warnings about the mini. Always buy apple care on them and make sure to always have a backup of your data. They said that they were fantastic machines but the small size and the fact that many people used them as an always on machine that they had a much higher failure rate especially the hdd's.

I do shut my mini off at least every other night~maybe that's some of the reason I'm gettin' good mileage off mine (2+ years so far)? Mine is going strong and wouldn't hesitate in nabbin' another one.

 

[Dreamkatcha]

An update for anyone following this: I managed to get Leopard installed on the SSD. It ran well to begin with, then the performance was terrible (videos and apps were stuttering and freezing) and now it seems to be quite snappy again. I don't know whether to persevere with it or ask for a refund. I've posted on the OCZ support forum to get their opinion anyway.

The 64gb capacity actually boils down to 56gb which is more dubious than the 'acceptable' losses you come to expect from hard drive marketing. I've noticed that the newer model ones are sold as 60gb which is much more honest, though it doesn't help V1 buyers like me very much.

I lubed up the fan bearings and that's eliminated the squeaking, though I'm now stuck with a more consistent, loud whooshing/spinning noise. Nothing out of the ordinary for the average PC, but a long way off the near-silent claims made by Apple.

It's probably actually back to normal, except now I'm using Fan Control to keep the CPU at a safe temperature (something Apple doesn't seem interested in doing by default) the fan noise is much more noticeable.

I raised the Mini off my desk slightly using a blob of Blu-tac in each corner. I'm not really sure if that's helped to reduce the temperature or not. While idling and with the lid off, the CPU is reading 62c while the fan spins at 1300 rpm.

 

[AC773]

If the fan is consistently loud, do you know what the temp sensors are reporting? They might be disconnected or faulty. I would try something like the (free) iStat pro widget to find out what's going on.

 

[akbc]

An update for anyone following this: I managed to get Leopard installed on the SSD. It ran well to begin with, then the performance was terrible (videos and apps were stuttering and freezing) and now it seems to be quite snappy again. I don't know whether to persevere with it or ask for a refund. I've posted on the OCZ support forum to get their opinion anyway.

The 64gb capacity actually boils down to 56gb which is more dubious than the 'acceptable' losses you come to expect from hard drive marketing. I've noticed that the newer model ones are sold as 60gb which is much more honest, though it doesn't help V1 buyers like me very much.

I lubed up the fan bearings and that's eliminated the squeaking, though I'm now stuck with a more consistent, loud whooshing/spinning noise. Nothing out of the ordinary for the average PC, but a long way off the near-silent claims made by Apple.

It's probably actually back to normal, except now I'm using Fan Control to keep the CPU at a safe temperature (something Apple doesn't seem interested in doing by default) the fan noise is much more noticeable.

I raised the Mini off my desk slightly using a blob of Blu-tac in each corner. I'm not really sure if that's helped to reduce the temperature or not. While idling and with the lid off, the CPU is reading 62c while the fan spins at 1300 rpm.

Some SSD's are slower than a conventional hard drive when it comes to small read/write. That could possibly explain your slow/fast bumps in the OS X.

When I first installed Windows XP on my Acer AspireOne SSD, it was slow as hell without any tweaking because of that reason. Might want to do some more research on that

G'luck

 

[Dreamkatcha]

If the fan is consistently loud, do you know what the temp sensors are reporting? They might be disconnected or faulty. I would try something like the (free) iStat pro widget to find out what's going on.

Yes, I'm using Temperature Monitor for that purpose. That reports...

CPU heatsink: 53c
CPU: 62c
Ambient: 49c

The fan is only spinning at 1500 rpm at the moment so it should be whisper quiet in theory, which does suggest that it's past its prime rather than simply spinning too fast all the time.

Thanks for the info, akbc. You're right, I do need to read around the subject a bit more.

 

[Dreamkatcha]

Another update: I took the SSD back and got a refund. Interestingly my Mini runs about 5 degrees cooler using the old stock HD - probably because the CPU isn't working as hard to compensate for the feeble access rates of the SSD.

I think I know what was causing all that stuttering now - getting good download speeds from Transmission. That's probably why the performance dips were intermittent; sometimes I was downloading at a few kbps and at other times getting up to 500 kbps. If these drives can't cope with downloading and playing a movie at the same time then they weren't fit for release. I don't remember seeing any 'alpha' or 'beta' labels on it.

On the positive side, Micro Direct's customer service was excellent. They didn't quibble about giving me my money back at all so that was a relief.