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With the rumors that the Mac mini may be eliminated from the lineup, I started thinking about selling mine. I looked at my options and decided to keep it to use it as a home theater. For now and until I get an iMac next January, I will do some upgrades to it.

[amazonify]B0006HU49Y[/amazonify] I head up to OWC at www.macsales.com and looked up prices for Ram and a hard disk. I’m totally surprised at how low the prices of Ram have come. A set of 2, 1GB sticks of Ram for the Mac mini is just $32.99, this upgrades the stock 1GB to twice the memory.

Adding Ram to the mini is as hard as adding the hard drive, the Mac mini is not user serviceable. You have to use a putty knife and other tools to open it and upgrade its components, I’m linking to a video from OWC about changing your memory on your Mac mini for your entertainment.

I also read that the Mac mini supports up to 3GB of Ram but doing so will make you loose the DDR capabilities of the chipset. I don’t really think that I need 2GB of Ram as 1GB has been enough for some time now. If you don’t know what DDR is, I’m including a link to Wikipedia with details about DDR2 memory.

For the hard drive, I selected the 250GB Seagate Momentus 7200.3. I haven’t heard much about this hard drive, if you have information about its reliability leave a comment on this post. The specification for this drive convinced me that it might me a great option; first, this is a 7200RPM drive, second, it has a 16MB cache, third, it has a 5-year warranty.

This takes my current hard drive from 80GB to 250GB and the RPM from 5400 to 7200, nice improvement on the overall performance. I need to have enough space to put movies when I finally transition the mini to the living room. I do have some worries, I would like to have AppleTV functionality and front row is not that capable. I know that it will handle anything on the mini but what about the web.

I will need to buy a wireless keyboard and mouse, in addition to the DVI to HDMI cable. I think that the Mac mini will eventually merge with another product line, upgrade from it current state or disappear for good. Which one will be, is yet to be announced, maybe during Macworld we’ll hear form Apple about the Mac mini.

I would like to hear from those of you who use the Mac mini as a home theater device. What is your experience? Would you change it to any other configuration? Please leave your comments on this post. Connect with me in twitter or Facebook, subscribe to me feed to keep in touch with my blog and me.