My wife and I took on the project of upgrading the memory in her Mac Mini this week. She had been complaining that she was getting the pinwheel quite a bit and that she could only have one or two programs open at a time.

I think the main memory hog for her is iPhoto. She lives in that program and has over 2200 photo and almost 3GB of data. The rate of photo taking has only increased since September, so we needed to do something.

Her original machine came with 512MB and we decided to go to 1GB. We didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter, since there is only one memory slot and the maximum you can put in is 1GB. A trip to our local CompUSA got us the 1GB upgrade for $89.99 after rebate. Not bad.

The only difficult part of the upgrade is getting the case apart. MacWorld has a great tutorial for doing the upgrade. You want to take their advice on finding the thinnest putty knives you can. I got thinnest I could at Home Depot and still had to use a razor blade scraper to get the putty knives started on each side. Once we got the case it took about 3 minutes to complete the upgrade.

She is already reporting a much better experience since the upgrade.

Our next task is getting a backup drive. I think we are going to go with the LaCie mini 250GB. It will sit nicely underneath her Mini and connect via Firewire. We can both backup our computers there, as well as archive some data we don’t use much. I’ll let you know how that goes.