Time for an Upgrade

A few months back, my home computer started behaving very sluggishly. Web browsing was painfully slow, sometimes reminiscent of the bad old days of dial-up internet connections. It also had a sudden difficulty in holding onto its wireless connection. Neither of these things had been a problem previously, and I suspect it had something to do with one of the Mac OS updates, but I didn't have the patience to go back and uninstall it; I wasn't even sure that was possible.

The computer is almost four years old, and I would have loved to simply replace it, but I could not justify the expense just now. I knew the RAM was upgradeable, so I looked into that. Back in 2007 Mac minis came with 1 gigabyte of RAM, which was adequate, but over time it had become less so. They can take as much as 4 gigs, and it isn't terribly expensive: $60 to max it out.

There was one hurdle, though: the procedure to open up a Mac mini of that vintage and install the RAM is a huge pain in the ass. I watched an instruction video on the site of the RAM vendor; it began with sanding down the blade of a putty knife to slide into the bottom of the case to separate it from the top, and got into much more complicated things like having to detach cables. It was way beyond my comfort zone.

(New Mac minis are much easier to open and upgrade, but if you still have CDs you want to load into iTunes, you have to buy an accessory external drive, which sucks. iMacs have a little RAM access compartment on the bottom edge.)

Having the RAM installed at an Apple store or other authorized service center would certainly cost enough to negate the notion of boosting the computer's performance on the cheap. I back-burnered the idea for a couple of weeks, until the computer's torpor got annoying again.

Then I had the idea to ask our IT guy at work if he had experience doing this sort of thing. He did not, but he knew someone else who did. I made it clear that I was willing to pay something for the person's time, but he said that wouldn't be necessary. I ordered the RAM, and when it arrived I brought my computer into work (its small size definitely made that easier), where our IT superhero took over and brought it to its appointment with Dr. Macinstein.

In practically no time the upgrade was complete, and my Mac mini had quadrupled its RAM, which made a huge difference in precisely those areas that were problematic. I still can't install the Lion OS, but based on what I've read so far, I don't feel like I'm missing anything.