What to do with my old Mac Mini

Okay, here's a non-Post Office, non-crime, non-school violence thread.

I recently received a nice gift of a brand new Mac Mini. I'm very happy about it, but now run up against the age-old conundrum: what to do with the Mid-2007 Mini it's replacing.

The old one has the 1.83 GHz processor with a whopping 1GB of RAM (2 x 512MB). It's running OS 10.5.

I know I can upgrade to 2 GB of RAM. I think I can go as far as 10.6 on the OS with this processor. So my question is should I keep it? Maybe upgrade the RAM and replace the hard drive (http://www.mac-upgrade-store.com/collections/mac-mini-mid-2007/products/solid-state-drive?gclid=CIWP0fDW9sUCFdYXHwod03QAcA) and let it be my kindergartener's first computer?

Any creative thoughts would be appreciated. It doesn't have a lot of mileage, just years.

I'm always a big fan of the 'sell it on eBay' option. Sometimes things sell for crazy amounts. It can take a little while to prepare for the sale and listing is a little bit of an annoyance, but I find it's better to recoup some of the cost of things than to bother trying to find a use for stuff.

A good thought. I just looked on eBay though and we're looking at maybe $100, and mine isn't upgraded to the level of the $100 listing.

Plus, I wouldn't want to sell it with the hard drive on board. Too many years of tax returns on there.

Media center device.

Network server.

Home control station.

You might be able to throw some form of Linux on to it and call it a day.

Freeway said:
You might be able to throw some form of Linux on to it and call it a day.

We're an Apple household for the most part. It would be weird raising my daughter in a different religion.

Donate it to the high school so someone can take it apart and see how it works?

Hey Mr. I,

I have taken apart a good percentage of Apple Macs, including iMacs, Xserves, etc, and I can tell you that the mini is the biggest PITA to disassemble. Once you're in, it's fine.

Still, at OS 10.5 you can run home sharing with iTunes, not much else. You can't update the OS and it can stream video but it can't do HD well. I guess you could hang some networked storage off it, so long as it didn't need to be fast. It does what it can do and can't get any OS or software update. Whether that makes it worth the effort to add more memory is dubious to me, but then, if it sounds fun then you should.

mrincredible said:

Freeway said:
You might be able to throw some form of Linux on to it and call it a day.

We're an Apple household for the most part. It would be weird raising my daughter in a different religion.

Apple and Linux are both born from Unix on a long enough family tree.

Oh and you are correct Linux is a religion. Apple has fanatics that wait in line for days for the newest ipad, Linux has maniacs like me who wont buy anything I can't run linux on at some point during its lifecycle.

I have a similar vintage Mac Mini upgraded to the max, and it runs frustratingly slow, especially for my kid's attention spans. An SSD in place of a spinning hard drive might help that but I don't feel like dropping the cash on such an old computer. Since they only care about Minecraft, I'm thinking of buying a cheap Windows (gasp!) box as a dedicated gaming machine

Hm. Okay. Looks like I am pulling the hard drive and recycling the rest.

Thanks for the advice everyone!