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Today (March 3, 2009), Apple released updates to all its desktops machines, some updates to the notebooks, and updates to time machine and airport extreme. In the much-anticipated updates there are still some that where disappointed but as far as I’m concerned, I’m super excited.

The product that excites me the most is the new Mac mini, it’s still has the same form factor but the inside is another story. The new Mac mini gets rid of the old combo drive, in fact there’s no new Mac with a combo drive anymore. Read the rest of this entry →

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.

I have a Mac mini and for a long time I wondered how to mute the start-up chime without affecting the system sound at all. I found several options around the web to include terminal hacks that didn’t worked, plug-ins that were not as effective, and hundreds of opinions from several forum members that were not as accurate as what I found on my own.

Before telling you how easy my method is, let me explain to you what I came across while playing with the sound options on my Mac mini. Whenever you plug external speakers the audio profile for a connected item acquires a different profile from the internal speaker. This means that while you can mute the internal speaker, this doesn’t affect the external speakers. Read the rest of this entry →

Growl is a neat application that allows you to notifications of different events happening in your computer in real time. You can hook up several items within your system to notify you as they happen, application like Mail, Safari, can be easily hook up to Growl as well as several third party apps.

I had Adium, Cyberduck, and Mozy hooked up, notifying me of anything happening on my computer like the start of a back up, new email messages, new chat messages, etc. The application is very unobtrusive and very reliable, it doesn’t take many CPU cycles and almost never crashes.

To uninstall Growl, visit the system preferences pane, select Growl from the menu. Deselect the status items (if you even have this option,) deselect the option to start Growl at login, and stop the application from running. After this click show all to show your entire system preferences pane, right click on the Growl icon and click on Uninstall Growl. You can also visit growl removal on the Growl.info website.
Read the rest of this entry →

I finally gave up my D-Link router and got an Apple AirPort Express, I waited two years since I originally plan this purchase but it was well worth the wait. I got the latest version of the Apple Airport Express with “N” technology (or draft “n”), none of my computers or gadgets has the “N” specs but I’m just getting ready to the future.

What made me go for the Apple product was the recent purchase of a used PowerBook G4, I try connecting to my D-Link router and I was often loosing connection, which made me very angry. I disconnected the D-Link, which had wireless “G” and four Ethernet jacks to went totally wireless, this has an impact on my Mac mini because up to today it was always connected via Ethernet.

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So the main difference is just the speed, my Mac mini was getting great download speeds on some networks and I notice that this has decrease about 40% since I moved to wireless. This got me thinking, how fast is fast enough? My cable service advertise my plan as 7Mbps, that’s only the download speeds, my upload speed is about 300k/bs.

Read the rest of this entry →

I recently bought a new Airport Express 802.11n from Apple and got rid of my 3-year old D-Link router, my first impression was, how come I didn’t do this long time ago. The truth is that it was on my mind but since the D-Link DI-524 was working ok, I was just waiting on it to die.

While it didn’t die I purchase a used PowerBook G4 and I was having issues connecting, sometimes losing the signal after being connected for awhile. That was enough to make me go out and get one of those new Airport Express, and it works like magic. I had a small hiccup when I first connected because I told the setting to connect to the existing network, which was already disconnected (my D-Link.) I had to reset the Airport Express delete the connection profile from my Mac mini and create a new one for the Airport Express.

Ever since its been working fine, no drop connection on my PowerBook G4, reliable connections on both my iPhone and my wife’s iPhone and my Mac mini is running using the internal 802.11g antenna. The four devices work great but what impressed me the most was the ease of configuring one of my printers to work with the Airport Express.

I have two printers, one is a Canon MX-310 which I got when I purchase my Mac mini on September and a Brother HL-2040 that I bought over a year ego. I connected the Brother printer to share it on my wireless connection and its working great too, my excuse to do this as opposed to have it connected directly onto the Mac mini is so that my PowerBook G4 can print even if the Mac mini is off. Using printer sharing options, I was able to share the Canon printer but only when the Mac mini is on.

I already made some changes on my Airport Express unit, I set the DNS addresses to point to OpenDNS, which is a must for me. I set up my encryption scheme to use WPA with a HEX key (personal preference,) and changed my SSID to something that identifies the unit less to prevent curious people to try to hack my router just because is a Mac router (you know, haters.)

At $99, I think the Airport Express is a great router, while most people see it as an extension to a network I think it performs wonderfully as a single router. As an added bonus, this router is using 802.11n which will be good in the future as I transition to new machines. If you are having issues with your Airport Express or you just love yours, leave a comment on this post, share your experience with the community. Thanks for reading.

I rented a movie for the second time since iTunes is offering the rental option, I rented the movie War, with Jet Li and Jason Statham. The movie is ok, it didn’t really impress me, lots of action but weird plot. Don’t think that this post is a review about the movie, I’m going to talk about the rental experience.

I fired up iTunes and close every other application, looked for a movie, watch the previews and decided to watch War. I clicked on rent and confirm the rental, went to my kitchen to grab drink and returned to my room, then clicked play. The whole point on mentioning what I did is because I want you to have a clue of how much time went by before I hit play, I would say about 10 minutes.

The movie is 1.23GB in size and around 350MB had downloaded at the point when I hit the play button. I immediately noticed the glitches that I noticed on Fantastic 4, which was the first movie I ever rented on iTunes. The problem is not the amount of download then, we are talking maybe processing power.

I own a Mac mini with an Intel Core2Duo 1.83GHz and 1GB of RAM, the downside on this machine is that it only sports Intel GMA 950 discrete graphics with 64MB ram shared from the main board, meaning, I know my limitations. In addition to this, I have a 22-inch Westinghouse monitor that cost me only $169, which looks great but is not even close as good compared to some other brands.

The glitches I was seeing were like when a movie skips, you know, when a DVD is mildly scratch. Then to make things worse, an hour into the movie I pause it and when I hit play back the audio continue but the video was not moving. I had to exit full screen mode, search back a minute to start where I left off, and then enter full screen again.

This was so inconvenient, I don’t know for sure, if is that my system is underpowered for this type of use, but I’ve never had any problems playing DVDs. These are the only two issues I had, I’m hoping that they are software related. Share your experience with me, have you rented movies on iTunes? Have you noticed any glitches? And if so, what kind of configuration you have?

I got around renting a movie yesterday on iTunes, this will be short I promise. I started wondering which movie to rent and ended up renting Live Free or Die Hard, not a bad movie, I wish I would have watch it in the theaters when it was out. I encounter some issues on my way to renting the movie but once the movie started downloading, I had no other problems.

When I first hit rent movie my iTunes stalled, it took around a minute to come back and when I hit the rent button again it behaved the same. I restarted my Mac mini, got to iTunes, and hit the rent button again, it took me to a page that within iTunes and said that the user agreement changed and I needed to agree to the new one.

After that it prompt me if I was sure I wanted to rent the movie, it prompt another message saying that my account was going to be charged and the movie started downloading. At first, the download process was very slow, so I waited to hit play. When it was 33MB into the download and the times started to decrease I hit play and had no other issues watching the movie.

I have a 22-inch display on my Mac mini and stereo speakers, the experience in regards to the image quality and sound quality were exceptional. I enjoyed the movie, which was a good choice for a first rental, since is an action pack movie and fast-paced scenes behaved well. I noticed two glitches on the movie but I’m not sure if it was the movie or my Mac mini or the streaming, it could have even be some background work like time machine, at this point I’m not sure.

I transferred the movie to my iPhone and the process was smoothly but I notice a couple weird things. Now every now and then iTunes is taking longer to switch from rental tab to music tab to iTunes store tab, I’m sure you get the point. My feeling is that iTunes is checking for the time left of the rental which I think it will be inconvenient if you rent a lot at the same time.

On my iPhone, the movie looks great, note that the movie instantly disappeared from my Mac mini once it transferred and since I stop watching it at the credits it started just there when I hit play on my iPhone. Keeping Steve honest about whatever he said on the keynote. Feel free to contact me if I missed anything and you have questions, I’ll be talking a lot about this, the new iPhone update, and Office 2008 for Mac in the following articles.

I just finished updating and setting up the latest version of iStat Pro and I decided to talk about it a little bit, this application has been very handy for me as I’m running some medium size applications on a Mac mini. The latest release of iStat Pro version 4.5 add several features that are a must have on a tool like this for the everyday user of Apple computers.

First let me talk about what iStat Pro can do for you, iStat Pro 4.5 is a utility software that loads on your Dashboard as a widget. It tracks your computer activities to give you fast access to statistic information about the performance of your Mac as well as hard drive space, temperature, networks available, etc.

Is a very useful tool for me because on my Mac mini (Intel) I can’t run applications like Photoshop Elements, Firefox, and Microsoft Office at the same time without having issues. This is just one example of applications that will consume all my resources very quickly, I can monitor memory usage and processor performance to identify when I need to close some application to be able to finish my tasks faster.

When I was running the same applications on my previous Mac mini (G4) I was having problems where everything would slow down on me for some reason from time to time, I installed iStat Pro and notice that my problem was Firefox. With Firefox updated and my recent purchase of an Intel Mac mini, now I’m running more applications at acceptable speeds.

I make good use of it when encoding movies, you can tell if your processor have some clocks speed available to check your email or not, you can tell if you network is moving information when is suppose to be static. The amount of information you get from this app is priceless, and everything is customizable. You can add and remove modules, monitor only some networks, and it even has a shortcut to Activity Monitor for more details.

The new version 4.5 brings some great new features, like details and controls for PPP/PPPoE connections, improvements to temperature monitoring service, shortcuts to access drives from the widget, and some bug fixes. Visit iSlayer.com for more details, I strongly suggest everybody to get this widget. I have used it for some time now without any problems and it’s FREE. Consider donating some money to this developer if you like this application, I think is worth it.