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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