Should I buy a Mac Mini?
It looks like Daisy (my main Windows PC) is on her way out. I’ve recently had intermittent problems with her recognising all her memory (both sticks are fine though) and now she’s starting to reboot on me randomly. Wouldn’t you know it that just as I was wanting to get on with some work this morning she’s rebooted on me three times on a row? Once I got a blue screen of death, the other two times the power seemingly vanished, leaving her to reboot. Ho hum. I’ve now got her running through checkdisk to see if there’s anything that can be done there.
In the mean time though, I’m having to think about replacing her. It’s money I can’t really afford right now (although we are in a slightly better position financially than we have been in a while), but I’m thinking I’m going to have to replace Daisy with a Mac Mini.
I’ve had buying a Mac Mini on the back burner for a while now, and I was expecting to buy one much later in the year to replace Daisy anyway but right now I’m really not sure what configuration to go for. With the move over to the Intel Core I’m still going to be able to run Windows XP using Boot Camp, which is fantastic - It means I’ll still be able to test websites effectively in Internet Explorer and run the various Windows only apps that I make use of. This is all good.
The price, however, isn’t. The £449 basic Intel Core Solo model is affordable but I’d really want to bump up the RAM to 1Gb which would add another £70 to the bill. But would I need to do that? The model I’d really want to get though would be the £599 Core Duo model, since I feel that it would end up lasting me longer and frankly be the better machine. Of course, I’d need to add another £70 onto that as well to bump up the RAM. And £670 isn’t a tiny amount to go and spend off the cuff.
Then there’s the fact that I do already have my iBook. Do I actually need to buy a new computer if Daisy fails on me? I could plug a keyboard, mouse and screen into him and call it a day, but then I wouldn’t have a Windows box for testing on, and I wouldn’t have access to the Windows apps which I currently use. It would also mean I’d be running at 1024x768 instead of the 1280x1024 that I’m used to.
So, what do you think? To buy or not to buy? Add more RAM or not? Oh, and does the Mac Mini wake up from being suspended as quickly and wonderfully as the iBook does?
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