LOL, before I get flammed, just hear my story lol. I went into my local computer exchange store (i'm from the UK btw), and traded in a dead-beat 360 (which to be honest shouldnt have been taken in, it was broken from a bad firmware flash) and my old w850i phone. I then got a £300 exchange voucher, which I used to acquire a nice little G4 Mac Mini. Specs are:

1.5Ghz G4 Mini
1GB Ram
80GB HD (5400RPM, not the slower 4200RPM ones ;p)
ATi Radeon 9200 64MB
Superdrive
Bluetooth + WLAN
Mac OS X Tiger (legit lol)
iLife '05 (bundled with Tiger CD) and '06 (legit, standalone CD)

That was it. I went and bought an apple wireless keyboard for £25, and I already had a wireless mouse. Had to buy a belkin hub (7 port) because I'm a usb freak, will need to get another hub soon-ish as well. Anyway, not bad so far eh? I've been using Windows for pretty much all my life (so 8yrs or so, i'm 18 now) from Windows 95 up until Vista recently. I dunno why I bought a Mac, just was intrugied by it when I was browsin at my local Apple store, which opened up recently. Gotta say, I've been missin out on this for years. Since I bought the Mac, the windows box has been gatherin dust, and has yet to be opened. I find no need for it now, as everythin my windows box does, my mac does better.

The store sell the low-end core duo mac mini for £50 more, which I'll get in summer after my exams. (Stock settings; i.e. 1.66Ghz, 512MB Ram, Combo drive, 60GB etc..) I'll probably open up my mac mini, take out the HD, and replace it with a dead HD, and bring it back so that I can get the newer mac mini, but dont tell them.. lol ;p

But yeah, I really like OSX itself, and the Mac mini is a blessing, how on earth did they fit everything in there, and make it run?! * gasp * I've yet to hear the internal fan even start buzzing, my only annoyance would be the loud sounds the superdrive makes when loading/ejecting discs. Meh, I rarely use discs these days anyway, its all SSDs these days baby!

P.S - SSD for those who dont know, stands for Solid State Drives And I forgot to mention, I bought an apple remote off ebay for £8, and already had an old MCE IR receiver lying around, plugged that in, installed Mira, and I was set. (After a few modifications, thank you google )

That's a cool little machine. Only thing holding me back from getting a G4 mini is the lack of Core Image, therefore, Core Animation. Still, a nice machine, enjoy.

it's a great little machine isn't it?

yes it is

im still happy with my stock intel mini, although the lack of ram is starting to show

What Graphics Chipset is iMac G4 using? I thought they were all using GMA950.

--danyel

I totally relate. I bought a 965-based system that really has some trouble with with current OS X so I traded in a bunch of spare parts for an old teardrop G4 1.25 with 768mb and the 17" LCD widescreen.

So now I have a loaded, top-of-the-line E6400, 965-based media center that cost a fortune, and an old G4 mac.

You can guess which one never gets used.

Hehe, the G4 Mac Mini's use the ATi Radeon 9200 32MB gfx card, the second revision (aka mine) gets the vram bumped upto 64MB, the newer Intel Mini's use integrated (aka onboard) gfx, which I believe is as you said, GMA950. Dont really like the idea of onboard gfx cards tho.

Double post because I'm pure lazy, but anyone here got some fancy guides to pimp up the Mac? What I've done so far is abit simple, but still kewl. I went and downloaded a bunch of nice wallpapers, put them in a folder, and told the mini (thru the system preference) that it will change the wallpaper everytime it comes out of 'sleep' mode. Quite nice, now dont have to stare at the same pic everytime. Attached a screenshot of the desktop, for u guys to see what I can improve on. (Why does the Mac like to take an absurdly large picture?)

Edit ~ LOL, looks like the admins are a step ahead of me, they managed to fix double posting xD

Those G4 minis make very good small web servers also, if you're so inclined to install OS X Server on it.

No need for that really, just install MAMP and you're ready to go.

OK I'll bite, what is MAMP?

Love the Mac mini's but Apple should come out with a Mac Mini Pro version. Same size. Higher performance. They'd sell a ton of them

MAMP is basically a way to install Apache, PHP & MySQL (plus perl bla bla) through one simple application. It handles the configuations of the servers, as well as starting/closing them. Sorta like XAMPP but for the Mac

Ahh... cool beans. Thanks

Yea, I'd get a stock intel mini if it wasn't so antiquated



Yea, I'm waiting out on a stock mac mini. I'd get one now, I like the $599, but I'll wait till SuperDrive is standard, Core 2 Duo 1 G of RAM, and 80 GB HDD all standard. Then I'll upgrade to mouse and kb from apple, and I'm set.

To be honest, adding an extra 512MB stick of ram wont cost you that much, especially since DDR2 is cheaper than DDR (go figure.. >_>), the superdrive you can nab off ebay, and I always recommend to folk who get a Mac mini to get themselves a faster (7200rpm) HD, a 120GB Seagate Momentus will cost you £50 off ebuyer, and I'm sure our cousins over the ocean (americans, canadians) get it at a similar price.

Oh and don't forget to buy a putty knife... you know, so that you can open the computer up

For the hard drive I have only two things to say - external Firewire

The Mac Mini is one of my favorite Macs of all time. Just wish it had better graphics card and processor.

Yikes! I'm running out of space already.. Little question for the UK users of InsanelyMac, is there a website (online shop, like amazon, ebuyer, overclockers etc..) that sells external sata hard drive enclosures, with firewire out instead of USB 2.0, as I would much prefer Firewire over USB. Its because I have a 160GB HD in my windows rig that I can make use off. So basically (incase u didnt get it);

I have a 160GB SATA HD, I want to connect it to the mini via a firewire connection.

Also, I've been looking around the tinterweb for 2GB sticks of memory, and all I've been able to find was 2GB ECC memory for servers, which cost stupid money. (No typo there lol) Its just that, the mini needs some more juice until I get a MB. So far, three weeks since conception, and it has not gone off since then, nor any dreaded blue screen of deaths (Oh wait, thats windows ) or any annoyances.

That's exactly what we're using It's called a Mini Stack

There are two versions. I think the first one was their best, but it's mostly cosmetic.

Problems with the ministack, is that there seems to be a widespread problem among users with its fan sound. Secondly, you cant get it in the UK lol, the two UK resellers on newertech's site dont stock it. I can get IDE enclosures that have firewire out, but not sata enclosures that have firewire out (instead just USB 2.0) which I dont want, because I'll have to get YET another 7 port hub ontop of the two 7 port hubs that I have.. (USB devices come and go in my room, I dunno where they are, and half of them I dont remember owning)

I am not aware of any 'fan sound' problem with the mini stack. We certainly don't notice any. While the mini stack isn't as quiet as the mini's fan, what is? Plus to get a full sized drive into an enclosure the size of the mini is hard to do to begin with. Not a lot of room for the hard drives heat to go, so the fan runs for around ten seconds every 5 minutes or so. For us this is not a problem, nor has it ever been a problem for the Seagate 160 Gig SATA drive that we use. No problems at all. Before we bought the mini stack we looked for around 3 months for a nice enclosure. We only found one other one and it was roughly 3 times the price! Personally I think these hard drive enclosure companies are missing the boat. I cannot understand why more companies don't make SATA/Firewire enclosures for Macs like they do for PC's. It was a very frustrating 3 months for us not being able to locate SATA/Firewire enclosures. Maybe there are more out there then there was 2 years ago when we looked for one. Try searching Newegg and Tiger Direct. If you're good with completing mods there is also one for adding a laptop sized SATA drive to the older G4 minis. Good luck with whatever you decide, I understand how frustrating it can be

I'm a fairly competant user when it comes with hardware. I have built over the years five computers of my own, and have no problem with opening up the Mac. (read a few guides, seems all u need is a thin putty knife, and steady hands lol) However, I dont really want to have to reformat from scratch, plus I've got that 160GB SATA HD lying there for no reason. Unfortunately, still no luck with finding that ministack v2. Any UK users on here care to lend a hand?

Note - Newegg.com & tigerdirect are US based companies, they arent in the UK, thus I cant get the said item.