Mac desktops forum: Mac Mini- Ram upgrade

The best way to speed up any Mac is to add RAM. Your Mac Mini will now be much more responsive and will work a lot better. The Mini uses the Core2Duo chip and that is, essentially, two processor cores working for you in one computer. You initially limited each core to 1Gb of system RAM. Now each one will have 2Gb and that will be a real boon.

That said, streaming is something that may depend more on the speed of your Internet connection than anything else, unless you can change the amount of video that your Mini caches as it's streaming video. You did not say how you are streaming your movies (whether it's using proprietary software from Netflix or some other service), but you can change your cache (which would be stored on your Mini's hard drive) for streaming video via Quicktime and via the Internet.

The RAM upgrade will allow your Mac Mini to get out of its own way, so if the lack of RAM has been the bottleneck, you'll see a vast improvement. But if you're still noticing that the video isn't streaming well, I'd say your connection is at fault.

Your Mac Mini is capable of using a Gigabit Ethernet connection. And that's faster than realtime for video. But your cable company is limiting you to 15 Megabits per second. Obviously, that's a lot slower than Gigabit.

A computer will typically cache some of the video it's playing back in RAM but the place for a good video cache is one's hard drive. If you open up Quicktime and click on Quicktime Preferences and then choose the Browser tab, you can change your movie download cache size. I recommend you consider doing that and you may find that you will tend to download more of the movie for viewing before it starts to play and that may fix things.

to that slow machine.
It may help your problem.

1 GB is the limit. Try places like crucial.com or Ramjet.com


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