Ok, so I finally took the plunge and made the switch to a Mac. Specifically I grabbed an older Mac Mini off of eBay. $200 for a 1.5GHz Core Solo Mini with 512 MB ram and a 60GB HDD. Not the most blazing fast of Mac, but something to start with. First things first, I installed iLife 09 and iWork 09 and got to business. Well, Leopard blows with 512 MB of RAM, so I grabbed a couple of 1GB sticks I had laying around, and since I'd be cracking her open anyway I also grabbed a 160 GB 7200 RPM drive I had handy. Now, first things first. I cloned my existing drive to the new drive to avoid a needless OS install. Then I watched about a million 'hack your Mini' videos on the interwebs. Finally I cracked that baby open. It was really easy! Installed the RAM and new HDD and fired her up. Perfect! Or not. Suddenly core sound was gone. Errg. After trying everything on apple.com I had to open her up again. No worries. I found a ribbon cable I had inadvertantly pulled out the first time. Plug in, boot up and tada! Sound!
Post upgrade the machine is quite usable, but I think a CPU upgrade is in my future. And the reason for the switch? Windows failed me too many times. I still use Windows (ver 7) at work, and I have a Windows box at home, just in case. But my daily non-work computing is all on the Mac now. Maybe once I upgrade to a Core 2 Duo I'll throw VMWare on it and ditch the fulltime Win box forever.
Cheers!
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