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Speeding up a Mac mini

J

John Archer

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 7, 2008
8
0
Hello
I work in an office which is made up of a number of mac minis
We have had problems with two of them running slower than the rest.
I have tried maxing out the Ram on one but there was only a small speed increase. I have read that some minis have slower hard drives than the others and that it is possible to speed them up by using an external 3.5 hard drive in a firewire enclosure.
Has anyone tried to do this and with what success? Can anyone recommend any equipment that may suit this purpose?
Many thanks for reading
Lasteph
 
You can check the More Info of "About this Mac" to compare the hard drive models that each has. You can Google the part # to see if it is 4200 or 5400 RPM.

Any external 7200-RPM USB2 or firewire drive will be faster than the internal drive of the mini. That is the quick and nasty solution.

The neater solution is to crack it open and replace the internal drive with a modern 7200RPM laptop drive.
 
What is a runaway task

Hello there
I have looked at the activity monitor
There seems to be plenty of free memory and Ram
I am not sure what a runaway task is so if someone could clarify would be grateful
Basically the machine slows alarmingly whenever entourage or excel are opened and there are consistent spikes on the disk usage monitor.
When this happened on another machine I maxed out the ram to 2Gb and only got a small increase in speed - making me think it was the hard drive
 
John Archer said:
I have looked at the activity monitor
There seems to be plenty of free memory and Ram
Click to expand...

How much RAM in the computer and what is its cpu? G4? Core Solo? Core Duo? Core 2 Duo?

I am not sure what a runaway task is so if someone could clarify would be grateful
Click to expand...

You'll see a runaway task when you sort your Activity Monitor by cpu usage. Generally, they'll fluctuate between 70% and 95%.

Basically the machine slows alarmingly whenever entourage or excel are opened and there are consistent spikes on the disk usage monitor.
Click to expand...

Which versions of Excel and Entourage? Are they PPC compiles? If so, which version of Mac OS X are you running on this machine? It might be a Rosetta issue.

When this happened on another machine I maxed out the ram to 2Gb and only got a small increase in speed - making me think it was the hard drive
Click to expand...

It could be. Tell us how much RAM, what hard drive size and how much of that drive is free. What devices (e.g., USB, FW) do you have connected to this Mini?
 
Cave Man said:
How much RAM in the computer and what is its cpu? G4? Core Solo? Core Duo? Core 2 Duo?

512Mb DDR2sdram
Intel core duo 1.66ghz


You'll see a runaway task when you sort your Activity Monitor by cpu usage. Generally, they'll fluctuate between 70% and 95%.

No there is definitely not a runaway task - nothing goes above 10%


Which versions of Excel and Entourage? Are they PPC compiles? If so, which version of Mac OS X are you running on this machine? It might be a Rosetta issue.

Microsoft office for mac 2004 which was purchased new with the machine

It could be. Tell us how much RAM, what hard drive size and how much of that drive is free. What devices (e.g., USB, FW) do you have connected to this Mini?
Click to expand...

two seperate tablets of 256Mb DDR SDRAM (512mb)
The hard drive is a Seagate ST96812AS 60GB SATA/150 5400rpm
The only connected devices are the normal keyboard mouse and monitor

Hope all that helps - thanks for taking the time to read prev posts
 
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