Resurrecting my Mac Mini (Core 2 Duo) 2008 vintage

Well thought I’d start another thread, rather than derailing Adrian’s thread any more than necessary 😎

So far this old girl has been gathering dust in its original box on my bookshelf since I retired it from active duty quite a few years ago. The clear white acrylic lid has yellowed a bit with age, but otherwise cosmetically it’s in good shape. Unfortunately it looks like the original power supply white brick has gone missing (or my wife has “Marie Kondo” it at some point 😂) so I’ve ordered a replacement as it uses a particular Apple plug on the back, so can’t just piggyback a 20V laptop one.

It’s also going to need a fresh coin cell battery for the CMOS backup/clock and while I’m in there I’ll perhaps spruce it up with a £25 Samsung SSD.

That’s it for now - just trawling YouTube videos (like this) to see how best to get the case open and the innards apart 👍

I didn’t even realise that Minis had batteries! So far my 2005 and 2012 ones are going strong on the original batteries, as is the 2019 one.

The PPC one will be a nightmare to replace if I don’t outlast it, but it will give me a chance to upgrade the RAM.

I think it's just a CR2032 button cell. I'll probably replace for good measure when I put the SSD in there. Now just waiting for a power supply....

Typing this on the old Mac Mini with OS X Lion 10.7.5

Not much resurrection required: required a replacement power brick after the original went awol. Needed a DVI to HDMI cable, courtesy of Amazon for a fiver, to plug into the monitor (had to get one that's bi-directional - as its more typical to have a DVI input monitor getting an HMDI output from a video card, rather than vice versa). Otherwise plugged in old PC keyboard and mouse and downloaded Chrome Legacy on a USB stick - as nothing really works with 10+ year old browsers any longer.

Fired straight up - the clock was correct, even recalled the old password and managed to get some software updates installed. Blimey!

Not sure its going to be much of a 'workhorse', perhaps if I plop in the Evo SSD and stick Linux on it. Though I might need to blow £6 on a vintage PC2-5300 2GB module to add that all important extra 1GB of RAM to max it out at 3GB. Easy tiger! Sorry Lion.

Benching Geekbench 3 the other evening.

Yep rock, stock and completely unmolested...just add 15 years. LOL 😂

Edited by Pheasant (Sat 24-Jun-23 14:48:43)

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Yep rock, stock and completely unmolested...just add 15 years. LOL 😂

I remember OS X Lion, on my original 2011 MBP, which I bought summer 2011 and was updated to Mountain Lion. That machine was sold off looong ago

I started off on Tiger in 2005. I’m not convinced that it’s improved since then.

My first iMac was Tiger... I think it improved up until Snow Leopard, beyond that I agree with you.

I was forgetting that Time Machine wasn't introduced until Leopard. But Leopard was a dog on my Mini, so from a performance point of view I'd still go with Tiger. (Not a lot of use nowadays, but it runs FreeBSD fairly snappily.)

Tiger too: my first MBP in 2007.

Back in the day I didn’t really countenance Macs until they switched to Intel…I was a heavy Windows corporate user at the time. Going Mac raised eyebrows with colleagues, but manage to muddle through with Office for Mac 😂