Icon credit to Kyo-Tux via the Creative Commons license 4.0
I’ve always wanted a Mac Mini G4.
I grabbed a cheap one off of eBay sometime ago, and I’ve had it sitting around waiting for the right stretch of free time to open it up and go to work. It’s turned out to be kind of a pain to work on, in truth. It is awfully tight once you pop off that top case and start trying to tinker around.
In general, I would only pay money for a 1.42 Ghz or 1.5 Ghz version. If you can, get the latest version since it has a bit more kick and a little more VRAM. The entry level versions though are only worth it if you can get them free. Once updated and refreshed, they don’t run TenFourFox too bad and make nice writing machines in particular.
On my 1.42 Ghz Mac Mini, I decided to repurpose my old Corsair 60GB SSD with a $4 IDE-to-SATA adapter. (It took forever for that tiny adapter to arrive via mail from China.) I used Corsair tools on my Windows machine to refresh the Corsair back to its stock speed with a secure erase. I also maxed out the ram for $20, though it was probably workable to stay with 512 MB if you aren’t going to do much browsing. Installing these upgrades was, again, a pain. The SSD is really just hanging in there, although there seems to be enough pressures from the sides of the plastic enclosure to keep it steady. Taking it apart also meant dealing with its fickle bluetooth cable. I don’t think I put it back together in quite the exact way it came, but it fits.
On the first try, the Mac Mini would not boot from my DVD nor would it eject my DVD! I had noticed that there was a little jumper on the IDE-to-SATA adapter, and that it would work fine in that state. After various troubleshooting techniques, I had to pull apart the thing again, pull off that jumper, and try to make it fit securely. This time, the Leopard DVD booted right up, even though the built-in speaker stopped working. It’s probably disconnected, but that’s not critical.
I went to work installing Leopard, updating the machine, and putting on the few programs I am going to keep on there. Part of this included doing a few cosmetic changes to the system, including the Mountain Leopard theme, for instance. In an attempt to install a special dock, though, I accidentally put a version of SIMBL that started causing the G4 to freak out, hang, and act like it was seriously messed up. Deleting SIMBL restored the G4 to solid operation.
As it is now, the G4 runs pretty well. The SSD definitely helps, although it seems like the motherboard is more of a bottleneck than the drive. WriteRoom serves as a perfect beautiful text editor/writer. I have future plans for the machine as a file server as well, but that will come another day.
Sorry for the tangent – we’ll get back to some crucial G5 info soon.
— Nathan