Today saw the arrival of my new toy – my brand new Mac Mini.  I am going to be using this to store much of my media content (videos and music) so that I can connect it to the sound system downstairs and we can have music around the downstairs of the house.

I am going to blog about the setup that I am using shortly, probably over on my techy blog (equalmark.net) when I finally get a design on the go.  But essentially what this means is that all the computers in the house are sharing one music library (the same files) and therefore when you add or change something with one computer it reflects on all the others.  Looking forward to see how this is going to work.

Some of you will know that I recently sold my Mac Mini in order to raise funds for a more modern MacBook computer.  Before doing this I used the Time Machine facility to make an entire copy of the files on my Mac so that I would have them for restoration when I get the new Mac.  But I have some questions which, after scouring the Internet I am yet to find the answers to.  Perhaps someone here can help?

The things is, is that although I want to restore my old files from the Mac Mini I don’t want to restore them all.  I mean lets face it our computers get riddled with all sorts of rubbish these days.  The more you do then the more they get cluttered and therefore I am a big fan of starting from fresh every now and then.  As far as I am aware when you switch on your new Mac it will give you the option of restoring a Mac from a Time Machine backup.  Well I sort of want to do that, but I want to simply look at the files that are backed up and then select which ones I wish to backup from.  Can this be done with Time Machine?

I suppose the other two questions that I also have are what is the easiest way of getting all of my photos from iPhoto onto my new Mac and the same with iTunes music?

Today I attempted (successfully at the moment!) something that I have been looking to do for a long time now, an upgrade to my oldest Mac Mini.  I finally got round to installing the two memory chips that I have had for ages, to make the total RAM in my music centre to 1GB.

I have two Mac Mini computers and jolly good they are too.  The one I use all the time (I am typing this on it now) is a newer version of the affordable, compact Mac desktop.  It has an 2.0 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 2gb RAM.  I also have a Mac Mini that is connected up to the TV downstairs which works as a media centre, streaming music around the house, and in particular into the rooms downstairs.  This Mac Mini is a little older, and in fact I got it a little cheaper as it was being super seeded by the new generation minis at the time.  Its is a 1.83GHz Core Duo processor and just 512mb of RAM which for just playing music in iTunes was fine.

Anyway I wanted to upgrade for the simple reason that I wanted to install Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard on it and therefore I thought that it would be much better suited to having at least 1GB RAM.  I also had to spare 512mb chips handy because when I bought my newest mini that had been upgraded, it came with the original chips, which I thought that the time I could use to upgrade my media centre mini downstairs.

I have put it off so long because I have been aprehensive about doing the job.  Mac Minis are, well, mini and compact and therefore poking around inside them can’t be the easiest of jobs and if you don’t know what you are doing then something could easily go a miss.  I searched around the net for a few minutes and found endless guides on how to replace the memory in an Intel Mac Mini, many of them where video tutorials and they are all pretty easy to follow.

The hardest part of the upgrade was getting the case of the Mac.  You have to prize it off with a putty knife or a thin wall paper scraper would do the job.  Its hard because you really don’t want to put too much pressure on the case as I was affraid of breaking it.  However you do need a little brute force in order to free.  I did make some minor scratches on the case, but most of the internet guides said as much.  The good thing is, is that the marks are left on the bottom so that you don’t see them when the Mac is in use.

From there is was easy, however beware as at the front there is a small black wire that needs to be removed in order to lift off the CD Drive and hard disk, and you must remember to replace it.  I forgot to replace it and although the Mac worked the fan was going mad and therefore I assume it is something like a temperatire sensor.