Pimp out your mini!

http//www.fastmac.com/ProductPage/minimax.html

wow...its about $630 to get a 100GB HDD, 1 GB of RAM, and a 8X DVD+-R DL superdrive in there. ouch.

that's ridiculous

Their ram price isn't bad actually if they're using a good brand. Regardless you could do it cheaper yourself and the hardest part will just be opening the case.

anyone found a link to the bluetooth/airport upgrade kit? I get my mini tomorrow, i'm so stoked

you could do this stuff much easier yourself, why not spend that 199 for a harddrive on a much larger, faster external harddrive that connects via the USB or firewire port? need 1gb ram? buy some off the net somewhere and install it yourself, there is guides online on how to do this. now the dvd r internal burner, i dunno much about this but im sure theres a guide somewhere out there

Both drives are just smaller laptop sized. You'd wanna be very careful to make sure you get the same size though. Those insides are packed. As for the upgrade kit, I'll point out there are no official plans for it to be sold as such. It's meant to go to Apple stores where you take your mini and pay them $99 to do it. That being said I do imagine it'll become possible to acquire it on your own. However not any time soon as not even Apple Stores have the kit yet - in fact quite a few don't even KNOW about it yet it seems. O_o

Also two reasons to upgrade the internal HD. First off, ports are limited. Two USB2.0 and one Firewire port. After selling this iMac off once I've got the mini I plan to get a gig or ram and a USB2.0/Firewire hub but even then that's splitting the speed between multiple devices. So having more space internally could be nice. Second, the 80GB hard drive will suit my needs, it's better than the 60GB in here. However it's also SLOWER, in fact slightly substandardly so. You can replace it with something much faster without a problem. Might be a little warmer but that just means you'll hear the fan a bit more often.

anyone got any good sites on this stuff? i wanna look more into this

http//www.byodkm.net/ is a good site for just about anything on the mini from upgrades to extreme mods. (Just check out the gallery D)

can u hook these things up to a TV? i saw that pic of one guy had it hooked up to his huge tv, man if i can do that im gonna hook it up to my free sony 27 inch screen, YES!

Some HDTV's have DVI input or something that can be converted to from DVI. I'm not extremely knowledgeable on the subject as my TV's a 19" one with a missing power button. I think depending on the TV this works either well or not well. I've read a few comments that parts of the image get cut off, especially with a converter.

Their price is fairly competitive on the RAM upgrade. Looking around about the cheapest I can find good quality memory that is guaranteed compatible with the Mac Mini is 180. For 199 they'll open it up for you and do the upgrade.

Honestly, the only upgrade I'm really interested in is RAM (when I get the cash to buy a stick) and the Bluetooth/Airport card, and even that's very optional considering I don't have any Bluetooth stuff or wireless ethernet.

I'm getting sorta frustrated with the lack of a single program to shrink my DVDs down however. I really wanted this to be my DVD ripper while I played Counter-Strike Source.

Haven't looked very hard have you? O_o

Personally I recommend D-Vision. The majority of the tools you find are graphical front ends to tried and true linix tools like ffmpeg and mencoder.

You can find it here http//www.objectifmac.com/english/actu.php

And I recommend http//www.versiontracker.com for your software needs.

I think you misunderstand what I intend to do.

I want to use compressed domain transcoding to shrink a dvd down so I can burn it with my DVD-R (single layer). DVDShrink will do all that for me with one program.

The program you linked to (which doesn't seem to contain a feature list on the site) seems to be for ripping DVDs to avi, which I do not want to do.

Yes I did. I'm used DVD ripper referring to a tool like that. I do believe ffmpegX can do what you need. It's a bit over kill since it's feature loaded but not that expensive either.

http//www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/15473

Popcorn from roxio will shrink a dvd to a dvd-r. You just need to rip the files with a seperate ripping program first. Here is the product page http//www.roxio.com/en/products/popcorn/index.jhtml[=http//www.roxio.com/en/products/popcorn/index.jhtml]http//www.roxio.com/en/products/popcorn/index.jhtml

ffmpegX might be a better solution than that though for both the price and that it can do the ripping itself.

Thanks for the link.

It looks like that program supports full reencoding, but not compressed domain transcoding. The difference is a few hours worth of CPU time. I guess as long as it works, and I can still play CSS, it's worth it to me. The quality should be better too.

That's the best I could find. It's loaded with encode options so you might find what you need there actually. I've debated getting in the past but I'd rarely make that much use of it. You're really paying for a front end there as almost all of it's operations come from open source tools. Granted unless you wanna learn to do it all manually from the terminal it's worth getting. ;)

Nevermind, it does support it, in the feature list it lists

'Compresses a DVD to 4GB without reencoding it.'

WOOT

[quote040a4b063e="adenosine"]Their price is fairly competitive on the RAM upgrade. Looking around about the cheapest I can find good quality memory that is guaranteed compatible with the Mac Mini is 180. For 199 they'll open it up for you and do the upgrade.
[/quote040a4b063e]

Their price on ram is horrible. They overcharge you by $35 then they keep your old ram. The install is easy, I wouldn't pay anyone else to do it.

Here is a better price on the ram http//eshop.macsales.com/shop/item/6559/OWC2700DDR1024/