Scored Intel Mac Mini Refurb Black Friday+19" LCD...Arrived Late Yesterday!

[rexrzer]

Long time no visit, so HELLO to everybody here. I've missed being around and chatting here with all you nice people for awhile. I've just been so occupied with my work, and being a Moderator at a popular car Forum, and so involved with MTR that I've not taken the time to check things out here for months.

Anyway, scored a nice Refurb'd 1.83GHz Core 2 Duo Mac Mini on Black Friday for $499 from the Apple Store, and got it a soul-mate, the Vison 19" 1440x900 widescreen LCD from the Fry's Outpost.com sale...bought them both at about 2AM PST to be sure to score the LCD especially, as it was only $129.99 minus a $40 online/mail-in rebate (combo) to Vison for a net cost of $89.99 plus $16.38 2nd-Day DHL Air shipping. The rebate looks to be a snap to get back quickly, as you file 1/2 of it online, and then just mail in the UPC codes from the LCD's box, so we'll see how that goes but it looks aok fine for a rebate deal.

Both arrived yesterday afternoon, and I got to set them up late after work last night. The new Mini is pretty dang fast! It came with OS 10.4.10 installed, no updates to 10.4.11, but the firmware update had been done. It has a Hitachi 80GB SATA HD, which is great news after the bad press on Seagate SATA HD's of late (see xlr8yourmac.com today for that news in detail).

Also came with Leopard!...in a "Drop-in Bundle" from Apple on top of the regular books.

I am scared to death to install Leopard on anything just yet, which is one of the reasons to start hanging around here once again.>< I intend to do lots of reading and following the Leopard threads before I even consider installing it...the whole thing just freaks me out. 10.4.11 is so stable and serene on all my Macs, PPC and Intel, that I'm just paranoid I guess. Should I install it? I know, dumb question...if you have to ask you shouldn't...I know that!()

Good report card on the Vison LCD so far also. It is very, very nice real estate for a 19" LCD. The Mini just picked up on the 1440x900 pixels deal straight away, didn't have to set anything, used the DVI hookup not the VGA. NO DEAD PIXELS!-D

It looks to be the best $90 LCD I've ever seen.(tu)

I'll be hanging around when I can from now on, will just keep a browser window open with MacResource.com on it, and will be following all the usual suspects here for info on Leopard issues. But yeah! This is a cool combo, the C2Duo Mini and the 19" widescreen LCD with DVI input and 1440x900 resolution, all for less than $600 before shipping & sales tax (CA).

Sorry to have been away so long, so once again a big HELLO to those of you who know me, and to those who don't well, I guess I am old news at this point so I'll just leave it at that.

Everything is going great personally, just busy and short on time for everything it seems. I didn't want to let the day go by without chiming in about my new Mini & $90 19" widescreen LCD.

Let the fun and FAH for the Team go onward!B)

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[AAA]

Leader

[Jimmypoo]

2 fingers, 2 arms, one thumb and several teeth.

I can only condone such overuse of smileys if you report back immediately on the
inclusion of a socket 775 CoreDuo Extreme, and provide the performance reports.

only THEN will you see a LEADER from me!

[Donkey Hotay]

jealous BF sweet deal L_E_A_D_E_R !

[spearmint]

Good to have you have you back Leader!

Wish I did not need laptop or I could get into the mini's real quick. Amazing they are not more popular at that great price maybe the compact size cannot convince people it is the legit workhorse it is. SUV syndrome?

Will interested to see your Leopard questions even though it will be years before it darkens my doorway.

[rexrzer]

Hi JP, DH, spearmint & AAA and thanks, yeah!(tu)

JP, those 775's cost a bundle, don't they? But yeah, that would be cool...I'm thinking about re-upping my 1.66Ghz Core Duo Mini with a new CPU as it really does need some help, so I'm looking for a great deal on some kind of Intel socket-CPU for it, really, I am!

We do have a source for that stuff at work, but I've just not sprung for any upgrade CPU yet.

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[blooz]

Check out the discussion sites on apple. Some people have had permission problems on install, others not. I did. There is a fix (thanks again, olnacl).
I'm pretty happy otherwise.

[Harbourmaster]

BLACK LEADER!

[rexrzer]

Thanks Ken! And how's the surfing going...anymore of those huge SW swells come through for you lately!? I have missed those outrageous pictures that you sometimes post...(tu)

As for blooz, hi again to you too!>< So you went ahead and did the Leopard deal...did you Archive & Install, Clean Install, or upgrade? A&I is the way to go, in my experience so far with most folks, unless it's a Clean Install, because it avoids the permissions ACL problems.

Even if I Archive & Install and have my backup properly done beforehand it just feels like totally uncharted waters. It's MY problem, I know that, so I'll apologize straight away for it even being in existence.

Good to hear that you, blooze, are pretty happy though...that's a good feather for me to put in my Leopard hat! So are all of the folks that I've upgraded. Though we do have many clients who are waiting it out right now-- for example we have one who owns a recording studio and has 5 PPC Macs and one Mac Pro in the studio, lots of RAID setups with FirmTek equipment, and assorted office iMacs and older Macs, and he's waiting for the dust to settle a little before he risks upgrading. I guess there are issues with Pro Tools right now to boot.

When I go with Leopard on my G5 2.3Ghz Dual Core (PCI Express) PowerMac, with its 2TB bootable RAID volume (FirmTek SeriTek 2e/EN4 4-Bay Drive Enclosure, 2 SeriTek 2SE/2E bus masters that have to have their firmware updated before I do Leopard) I have a lot of work to do to maintain integrity there, that much I'm certain of. I am probably going to have to simply Clean Install that setup, starting out with an install on my 1TB FireWire backup HD then migrating that install over to the RAID volume, formatted with the Leopard Disk Utility. That's the kind of thing I have to look forward to if I do the big change.

So yeah, I'm a little freaked out about going through all that when 10.4.11 is so gosh darn stable and rewarding for me at this point!:S

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[Jimmypoo]

Why is the OS causing everyone so many knee problems????