I think it would have been weirder if they'd gone straight from the 4 to the 6.

bonny,

I haven't added memory to a Mac Mini, but I added a hard drive to an old school iBook, a process that required disassembling it completely and putting it slowly back together. It took several hours, but in the end I had a 400GB hard drive instead of an 80GB one and a lot more knowledge about my computer. (that computer died about 3 months later, but it was the screen that crapped out on me, nothing I did to it. And I knew how to get the hard drive out to transfer to an enclosure for later use!)

If you're not scared by the very idea of taking something apart and putting it back together, I say go for it. Use a wooden or plastic table (that's pretty low-static) and touch something metallic and preferably large pretty often to ground yourself and static shouldn't cause you a problem. Print out some detailed instructions (there are plenty of sites where you can find such things) and have a blast.

Knowing, of course, that if you do somehow break it, you're out of luck. I'd say in this case you have less than a 1/4 chance of destroying it. Mathematically, that means you have an Expected Cost of less .25*$500 = $125 (the $500 is what I think you'd have to pay for a replacement Mini), so since you're saving $190 - you should do it! Math says so!

I love the math, Gris!

And thanks for the specifics about a wooden or plastic table. I'm thinking I can put the unit on a thick wooden cutting board next to the stove. I suppose I could just keep my leg against the metal the whole time.

As far as I can tell from the tutorial I watched, the entire process includes a bit of brute force in the beginning...using a putty knife to pry up the underside...four internal screws (super tiny), moving three antenna ribbons, pinching a clip (fortunately my fingers have the advantage of being quite small) and then pulling the motherboard off. Actually seating the memory is nothing.

Honestly, the prying strikes me as the hardest part.

It would _kill_ me to lose the $400 I paid for the thing, but the idea of paying $240 more just for a memory upgrade seems ridiculous.

The older white Mac Minis are one of the more difficult Macs to upgrade. It's one of the things they fixed when they switched to the aluminum unibody models.

I've torn many of them apart, and it's not to be taken lightly. You need a very thin putty knife, and then you have to exert more force than you'd think to release the top shell. The small connectors that you have to disconnect inside are easy to damage as well.

I recommend getting this toolkit form ifixit [link]

They also sell a recommended putty knife [link]

How much RAM does it have now?

I'd say live with it for a while and see if you see rainbow spinning cursor of "please wait" a lot. If not, the extra RAM won't do anything for you anyway.

I'm definitely going for that putty knife if I can't find something thin and strong at my local hardware mecca, ND.

Fortunately, I am tool-rich and have pretty much everything included in the tech kit. Though, those super long tweezers are kind of nice.

When pulling things apart...vacuum cleaners and such...my philosophy is always, low and slow...pry with patience and document everything that comes out on a placemat diagram, then clean up as you go out.

My father may not have given me much in this life, but he was way into Heath Kits and had me building jr. detective listening devices and 'hit a key and it lights up!' mini-organs when I was quite small.

I wielded a soldering iron long before it was wise for a kid to do so.

I never developed the love for poking around in tv sets that he had, but I can unscrew and peer into a thing with proper guidance.

Since it isn't a necessity right now, I will take Rob's advice and see what I can get away with before proceeding.

My current G5 tower has 3 GB on board and I'm paranoid about keeping it clean, so I take pains to run at about half capacity. It's STILL really slow.

I'm assuming that means I'll be near full-capacity with the mini.

How do you determine how much memory you are using?

how much do you recall?

Is that a memory joke?

yes. and a bad one.