I had an old mac mini mid 2010 lying around, and I decided to restore it to life, after I realized that a RAM-upgrade to 16 GB could in fact improve its performance considerably.
The new specifications after RAM-upgrade are: 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 16 GB RAM, 1066MHz frontside bus, 320GB hard drive.
Additionally, I have an external drive with 250 GB which I can dual boot from, running Ubuntu 22.04. The 320 GB internal drive still runs on macOS High Sierra 10.13, which is no longer supported. Therefore it makes a big difference to be able to run Ubuntu 22.04 and upgrade the OS as needed.
This mac mini runs surprisingly well, especially after the RAM-upgrade. I think I am likely to use it often to perform text editing, regular web surfing, or small data analysis projects with Python/Anaconda3. Despite the fact that this machine still does not have a 1st generation Intel microprocessor, the Core 2 duo does ok for such needs, and the biggest drawback of such an old machine is the GPU; an NVIDIA GeForce 320M graphics processor with 256MB of DDR3 SDRAM. Which means the machine is considerably more outdated in terms of graphics. I had sort of come to terms with the fact that this cannot be upgraded. But I was wondering: in theory, it should be possible to use the FireWire 800 port with an adapter to connect to a Thunderbolt port in an external GPU. I guess the cost of this would normally far exceed the rewards. But I was just curious. If I somehow got my hands on a bargain GPU, would it be possible to make this work?
The new specifications after RAM-upgrade are: 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 16 GB RAM, 1066MHz frontside bus, 320GB hard drive.
Additionally, I have an external drive with 250 GB which I can dual boot from, running Ubuntu 22.04. The 320 GB internal drive still runs on macOS High Sierra 10.13, which is no longer supported. Therefore it makes a big difference to be able to run Ubuntu 22.04 and upgrade the OS as needed.
This mac mini runs surprisingly well, especially after the RAM-upgrade. I think I am likely to use it often to perform text editing, regular web surfing, or small data analysis projects with Python/Anaconda3. Despite the fact that this machine still does not have a 1st generation Intel microprocessor, the Core 2 duo does ok for such needs, and the biggest drawback of such an old machine is the GPU; an NVIDIA GeForce 320M graphics processor with 256MB of DDR3 SDRAM. Which means the machine is considerably more outdated in terms of graphics. I had sort of come to terms with the fact that this cannot be upgraded. But I was wondering: in theory, it should be possible to use the FireWire 800 port with an adapter to connect to a Thunderbolt port in an external GPU. I guess the cost of this would normally far exceed the rewards. But I was just curious. If I somehow got my hands on a bargain GPU, would it be possible to make this work?
