Breathing new life into an old Mac Mini


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It is always a good feeling when you find a piece of old hardware in your closet, dust it off, and find a new use for it.

This is a first generation Mac Mini. 1.25GHz, 512MB of RAM, no WiFi, and no Bluetooth.

After a little help getting the OS reinstalled (dead DVD drive), I ended up converting it into....a Music Player!

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Can connect one of two ways. My iPhone (via the Remote App):

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Or a VNC client (screen sharing).

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Only the minimum is plugged in, and the power saving options are turned up.

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Installed a cheap 802.11g wifi adapter. I believe that's the $14 Rosewill special :p.

I really like that it works so well together. I was using my xbox 360 for music in this room, but it was annoying having the TV on in order to navigate. This is definitely faster :).

I would like something better than screen sharing to control iTunes on the Mac Mini. I find screen sharing to be laggy, and it would be nice to have a smooth interface.

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I would like something better than screen sharing to control iTunes on the Mac Mini. I find screen sharing to be laggy, and it would be nice to have a smooth interface.

It's probably lagging because you're VNCing over WiFi. My headless Mini is connected with ethernet, and I have no lagging issues at all.

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:laugh: Cool idea, time to look for my old PC lol.

Btw, snow leo?

The Mac Mini is running Leopard. As Radish pointed out, 10.5 is the last version that supports the PPC processors.

The MacBook Pro that I used to take that screen shot was running Snow Leopard.

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It's probably lagging because you're VNCing over WiFi. My headless Mini is connected with ethernet, and I have no lagging issues at all.

Yeah...I'm not going to run any wires to that location in the house so I guess I'll live with the lag for now. I wish Apple would come up with something better to use for Screen Sharing than VNC. Its functional, and gets by, but is crap compared to Microsoft's RDC protocol.

There is iTunes Remove Control. I'm going to give that a try. I wish there were a way to use the full iTunes interface w/o doing screen sharing. Like goto the Mac Mini shared library in iTunes on my MacBook, but when I play a song it plays in the Mac Mini not on the MacBook.

One nice thing about having the WiFi as an external adapter is if I'm having problems with the WiFi connection I can unplug and replugin the adapter. That way I don't have to do a full power cycle or grab a monitor/mouse+keyboard to see whats going on.

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