Jeff Biscuits, named after the famous Roman Emperor Jeffryus Buscuitus, is my 2006 Mac Mini. Now during my last "low" period in Adelaide I resorted to retail therapy on a budget. I bought a mac mini for $10 with the idea to run Linux on it to learn a little more for next year. My DOS command line skills are probably rusty but ok, Unix on the other hand is non existent. When the G4 mini I bought turned out (at this stage to not be working) I kept an eye out for a cheap mini (under $100). When I got home I noticed an ad that was a few weeks old for an Intel based mini for $90 that had been for sale for a few weeks. I called and offered $40 and it was accepted. Dad lovingly collected Jeff, packed him and sent him up on the bus.
I knew it was working but I wanted more than the 60gb of hard drive. A kind chap had given me two salvaged laptop drives for free 320gb apiece (one was a Seagate Barracuda). I set to installing one and after some swearing and complaining about not having Foxconn fingers I got it back together.
I booted the mac knowing that I'd have to root around to find the Snow Leopard DVD to install on it when I noticed that windows 10 was trying to boot. This got me thinking about whether this could be the answer to my windows problem.
I have been running a virtualised machine on my MacBook but am a bit sick of losing half my SSD for it. I use it for work (normally twice a year) to write reports and keep it current because We have changed software a few times already and each time we've changed it is Windows only until I cause a fuss. So I'd been thinking about a dedicated Windows machine. Sure I could've bought a Dell Optilex (I think thats the name) off Gumtree and be where I am now, but where's the fun in that. Plus I think the mini is better to look at than the Dell and I dare say probably better made (I mean it is a Dell).
I discovered this video from the 8-Bit Guy (formerly the iBook Guy) and thought about upping the memory in the mini to its max 2GB. I hit ebay and bought 2GB for $8 (posted) it arrived in many pieces because the seller had taped the two dimms together and stuck them in an envelope. Again a kind and anonymous person found two replacement dimms from scrapped notebooks and I was in biz again.
That is until I saw this and this, I put two and two together, actually got four and hit ebay for a Core 2 Duo CPU for Jeff. After 20 minutes I located Gary in NSW who had a stack of laptop CPUs for sale on Gumtree, among them were two Intel T7200s. I bought the pair for $3 plus $1.44 postage.
Now up to this point my Mac Mini 1.66ghz with 1gb of ram and 320gb hard drive was already running Windows 10 at work, slowly but reliably (there is a Realtek sound driver I need to find). I mean Jeff did everything I wanted, email was working, I could upload homework to my Google Drive and send out messages via Remind. I even installed Office 2016 (which requires 2gb of memory) and worked.
Tonight was a quest to see if I could not only, not break Jeff but also to improve Jeff to be a reliable workhorse again and free my MacBook's SSD from it's Windows partition. Success ensued the mismatched Hynix and Samsung dimms work fine, the CPU makes booting much more reasonable and the mini went back together well. Jeff's new specs: Intel Core 2 Duo 2Ghz 2GB memory and 320GB hard drive. Via an boot assistant called REfit It boots to windows in 1:18sec (not bad for an obsolete machine) and Mac OS in 20.2sec from the bot selector.
I have chosen to keep a tiny MacOS partition as: 1. Windows cant recognise the Mac partition of the drive to delete it. 2. I have just bought a ridiculously cheap Time Capsule for a mini network at work and Apple's Airport Utility is better for configuring, plus Time Machine will backup all of the Hard Disk including the 300GB Windows Partition.
So there you have it, a post about something nerdy, positive, ambitious and successful.
BTW I can now update the firmware in OS X to take 3GB of memory which will make it even faster if I can track down some DDR2 667 laptop ram.
Jeff Biscuits costs.
Purchase $40
Memory $8
Hard Drives $0
CPU $4.44
Thermal Paste $4.95
Total Cost $57.39 not bad for a recycling job.
I.M
No comments:
Post a Comment