macmini

Mac Mini alive again

by

January wasn’t a great month for me and my 2 Macs, as I managed to get both of them to stop working. First of all, the backlight on my MacBook’s screen stopped working, which I managed to fix after about half an hour’s Googling. Then I found my Mac Mini was refusing to boot but alas was not able to fix it.

The good news is that I have now fixed it. The bad news is that I’m not entirely sure what it was I did that got it to work again. Essentially, I took the lid off (easier said than done as it requires using a thin, flexible knife to prize the shell away from the base), poked at it, put the lid back on again and it booted up fine.

I say essentially because there was more to it than that. Because I was receiving the error ‘ALLOC-MEM request too big!’ from OpenFirmware while booting, I first assumed it to be a RAM error, so I took the RAM out and re-seated it, then booted the machine without putting the cover back on. That didn’t work, so I poked at the Bluetooth and Airport aerials to see if that made any difference – again nothing. So I put the lid back on and was about to concede defeat, but decided to see if putting the lid on had made any difference. And it had – the machine booted up, albeit slowly.

The computer is now running, although it does seem slow – that may just be because it always has been slow and I just haven’t used it recently. I haven’t yet restarted it so it may of course be a fluke, but right now all the programs on it seem to be working fine – no unexplained crashes and no grey screens of death as yet.

So if you have the dreaded ‘ALLOC-MEM request too big!’ error, trying taking your Mac apart and check if everything is seated correctly, and then try booting again. It may fix it. Of course, if it doesn’t, it may be indicative of bigger problems so don’t rule out a trip to the Genius Bar or a call to AppleCare.

And now it’s the Mac Mini’s turn

by

As many of you will know, as well as my MacBook, which I use as my main computer, I have a Mac Mini as well – this was my first Mac which I bought in 2005. It has spent the past year or so searching for a purpose – I was, and still am, hoping to turn it into a media centre but I’ve neither had the time or money to go ahead with it, and to be honest, I don’t really need to either.

Anyway, after yesterday’s shenanigans with my MacBook, it’s the turn of the Mac Mini to refuse to work. It’s actually not a problem that developed today – I noticed it wasn’t working last week, but as I run it headless I didn’t have a computer monitor to plug it into. All I knew was that it wasn’t registering itself on the network.
Today I had chance to use it with an external monitor. I heard the startup sound, saw the Apple logo on the screen, and then, nothing. No status indicator, just the Apple logo.

So, I zapped the PRAM – Command+Option+P+R. This time, the status indicator appeared for about 10 seconds before the Grey Screen of Death appeared, showing a kernel panic. This happened with subsequent boots.

So, I tried booting from the OS X CDs. Same problem. In fact, after a while, all I could do was access the Open Firmware command prompt.

This therefore means that there’s something wrong with the RAM or another component. Over the Christmas period, I took my Mac Mini with me to my parents in York, rather than leaving it in Bradford as I figured it would be safer. I’m guessing that it may have got jolted in transit and one or more of the components is out of place. It could also be bad RAM, but the RAM was only replaced in November 2006 and it was good-quality Crucial RAM. Plus, it’s a faff trying to get the damn thing apart and will probably require the purchase of another putty knife seeing as my existing one has gone missing.

In the meantime, I have a nice iOrnament.

Memory upgrade

by

Today I finally got around to upgrading the memory in my Mac Mini. Since buying it last year it’s had 512 MB of RAM, which is fine for general computer-ry stuff (reading email, browsing the web, maybe running iTunes in the background) but lately it’s been used more and more for playing World of Warcraft, which is a very memory-intensive program. With it running, doing anything else on the system is, at best, difficult – switching between World of Warcraft and, say, Firefox takes a long time.

I ended up buying the memory from Crucial – I’ve bought from before and had no problems, and this time was no exception. I ordered the memory yesterday morning, and despite going for the free delivery and not the more expensive guaranteed next day delivery it still came today, which is excellent. Crucial also happened to be cheaper than buying Corsair memory from either Scan or Dabs, and I’d rather not have generic memory if I can avoid it.

The reason why I have been putting the upgrade off isn’t so much the cost aspect (which ended up at £85 for 1 GB of PC2700 DDR RAM), but the actual upgrade itself, and in particular taking the unit apart. It’s a very small unit and the case isn’t screwed on – you actually have to pry it open with a knife – I used a standard putty knife from Wickes. Because my unit also has Airport and Bluetooth, you have to then detach one of the antennae before then lifting the RAM out and inserting the new module. Thankfully, there are videos which explain this process – I really would not have bothered if I hadn’t seen it being done first. One thing I did do, however, was boot the computer before putting the lid back on and making it sure it worked – after going through all the effort of taking the machine apart I didn’t want to have to do it all over again just because the module wasn’t seated correctly, for example.

Thankfully, the upgrade worked, and now the Mac has double the memory to play with. It’s not a seismic difference in speed but it does feel snappier; still, my MacBook, with its Intel Core Duo processor, beats it when playing WoW. But not by quite so much.