About a year ago I bought myself a cute little Mac mini to replace my Blue&White G3 that had died.  Around six months later I ditched the Mac Mini in favour of a more powerful and capable G5 tower which now acts as my primary computer.  Since then I’ve been at a loss to know what to do with my Mac Mini; I tried selling it to people I know, but no one was interested – I had bought it second hand and it just wasn’t new enough or powerful enough to be of interest to anyone.  So it sat in a bag on the floor in the study, feeling sorry for itself.  Until yesterday.

Having bought my wife a new mobile phone I found myself thinking about technical things (to try to quash the feelings of jealousy at her having a nicer phone than me), and after much research I found I could actually make use of the Mac Mini for very little additional cost.  We don’t watch much TV, so it wouldn’t actually be of any benefit to us for me to install a funky internet TV system, but watching iPlayer and YouTube on the telly sounded like a cool idea – much more comfortable than several people trying to cram into the study to watch stuff on my computer.

This, then, is not a detailed tutorial on how to create a media centre, but rather an explanation of what I have done to create my particular system.  It might not be what you need, and I don’t pretend to have all the answers to every question you could possibly have on media centres.  But I will be including screenshots to explain stuff, and hopefully someone will find at least some of this useful, or vaguely interesting.

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Over the years I’ve owned a motley collection of computers.  My first (other than family computers) was a little laptop I came to university with.  It was relatively cheap, being in an end-of-line sale at Novatech, so it wasn’t exactly state of the art by the time I bought it.  It had a 360MHz AMD processor, 32MB of RAM, a 5.6GB hard disk, and ran Windows 95.  Not exactly impressive, even then.  Still, it did me fine for a year, though it did spend most of its life sat on my desk and wasn’t really mobile much.  After that came a 1.2GHz tower, with 128MB RAM, 20GB hard disk, and Windows XP.  Even though it was still entry-level it was a significant step up for me, and allowed me to play games.  Not very good games, but they were games nonetheless.

However, it wasn’t long before I grew tired of the plastic look of XP, and started modding my desktop with all manner of programs, making it look very little like Microsoft designed it to be.  Eventually I found myself themeing everything I could lay my hands on to make it look more like a Mac, striving for that perfect interface.  It was no surprise then when a few years later I bought my first Mac, a second hand G3 Blue&White.  Although originally it would have been only 450MHz the previous owner had stuffed a 1GHz G4 upgrade chip from Sonnet in there, which made a big difference.  In terms of numbers it should have been slower than the PC it replaced, but in fact it was still faster and smoother and certainly more satisfying to use.  Hooray for Apple!

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I mentioned the other day that I was considering buying myself an iMac, to replace my current Mac Mini that is suffering from a lack of memory. The idea behind this was that it would work out cheaper than a full-blown Mac Pro, which would provide far more power than I would really need for my day-to-day work. Looking around on eBay proved that I might be able to stretch to a nice iMac, so all was looking tentatively rosy. Until my Dad left a comment, that is.

He recommended looking at a PowerMac G5, which isn’t brand new but would provide plenty of power and retain the ability to upgrade in the future. I was a little dubious to begin with, but a quick look at eBay showed that a typical PowerMac G5 was actually cheaper than a comparatively priced iMac. Tempting.

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I’ve finally got to the point where I’m considering upgrading my computer again. Some of you may remember that it’s actually not that long ago that I bought my current computer, a second-hand Mac Mini, to replace the previous G3 tower that died. In all honesty the Mac Mini was only intended to be a short-term solution, as I need to replace the G3 but didn’t really have a budget for it at the time, hence the need for a cheap stop-gap solution.

To be fair, the Mac Mini has been superb. It looks great, does the job very nicely, is blissfully quiet, and has a faster processor than the G3. And for a £260 Mac, it really was a bargain. Unfortunately, however, its power just doesn’t match up to my needs, and I’ve reached the point where I have to seriously consider budgeting for a more powerful alternative.

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Avid readers of this blog (oh, and friends too probably) will know that I fairly recently bought myself a Mac Mini, to replace my G3 Mac. It was all somewhat of a last-minute transfer, with the G3 dying almost without warning and leaving me having to go back to using my PC with Windows XP – not an experience I want to repeat if I can help it. The cause of death turned out to be the processor, which was an upgrade by the previous owner, and which stopped the computer booting up at all. So I ended up buying myself a second-hand Mac Mini on eBay, which was about all I could afford at short notice.

Despite being newer and having a faster processor (1.42Ghz rather than 1Ghz) I have to confess the speed increase wasn’t particularly noticeable. In some ways it was much better – its graphics capabilities were much higher, allowing it to do the funky Quartz stuff – but it still struggled on occasions, especially when running several large programs at the same time. That, sadly, is just the way my work goes though – it’s a rarity if I have less than 10 apps running at once, and that could well include several browsers, Photoshop, e-mails, RSS client, FTP client, calendar, address book, word processor… when I’m in full flow it gets rather crowded! In fact, that’s on reason I’m using a virtual desktops setup, giving me the ability to put different programs on different virtual screens, keeping things a little more organised.

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