Pimp My Mac Mini!

There comes a time in a young man’s life when his thoughts turn to flights of fancy.
And when I say flights of fancy, I actually mean a new gadget.
And when I say new gadget, I actually mean a new computer.

You know what I’m talking about. C’mon! Admit it!
The excitement of opening the box and unwrapping it.
The thrill of powering it up and seeing a new fresh operating system.
It’s enough to make you reach for a tissue to clean up with and then smoke a cigarette afterward.

But sometimes, alas, this is not to be.

Sometimes, the credit card debt is too high and the strength required to rationalize is unavailable, so you have to just make do with what you have, which in my case is a mac Mini.
It’s a perfectly acceptable, perfectly powerful machine that does exactly whatever I ask it to do.
It’s a very utilitarian relationship that we have: one based on needs and requirements.
Like prostitution in Las Vegas.

But, again, you all know what I mean when I say “I want more! I want different! I want new! I want exciting!”
Like having a different prostitute in say, Amsterdam.

Then I came upon a time tested and true idea, going back to the proud tradition of shade tree mechanics throughout history.

If I can’t make it new, I can make it go faster and look better.

There’s another prostitution analogy in that statement, but I think I will move on.

Go Greased Lightning! Go!
To make a computer go faster, you either buy a new motherboard or you buy new memory.
I don’t know if you’ve seen these mac Mini’s, but they are designed to be near impregnable. They’ve crammed a big computer into a small little box and every square centimeter is necessary and filled up with something - memory, hard drive, Bluetooth antenna, circuit board, laser beam, kitchen sink, Steve Jobs’ DNA in a small glass vial, whatever.
My computer came with a measly 512MB of RAM, as you can see below:

Hardly impressive, nor the things that computing legends are made of.
And let’s just say opening any application beyond a text document can be a chore.

To purchase my new RAM, I went to Crucial, which is evidently where all the cool kids are buying their RAM these days. I think it’s cool because you go to the website and you can actually have them scan your computer, and they will tell you what kind of RAM you need, how much your computer can handle and several different brands and price points to choose from.
For my mac, I had to download a small widget, but it took seconds, a few clicks and Crucial told me that I did indeed have a mac Mini and that I could have 2GB of RAM in there if I wanted it.
$50 later, my new RAM was on the way and I was halfway home.

Next we come to appearance.
As someone who drives a Saturn, I know unappealing but functional, and the mac Mini is truly that.
It looks like someone stacked two pieces of white bread on top of each other (crust trimmed off, of course) and put it on your desk.
Like so:

Now there is something very minimalistic about it, and it is certainly a lot better than a big beige box sitting underneath your desk, humming and grinding and wheezing like your crazy drunken Uncle.
But it’s white.
It’s safe.
It’s boring.

How the hell do you dress something like that up?
Lipstick?
Bow tie?
Tattoo?
Sharpie marker graffiti?

Nope.
You skin it.**
A skin is a reusable, cleanable, plastic graphic that you apply to your computer, or cellphone, laptop or iPod. You can choose from one of their many graphics, or you can make your own by uploading a favorite image or photo. Just think, you can have your favorite picture of your cat, Mister Jingle Puss, staring back at everyone at Starbucks when you open the lid of your laptop.
Talk about a win-win situation!

I clicked aimlessly around the many, many graphics, but really didn’t find anything that appealed to me, until I came upon one.
It’s classic!
It’s sleek!
It’s minimal!
It’s dangerous!

C’mon! You know it as the complete absence of boring Wonder Bread white, put your hands together for black!

I know.
That took a lot of imagination, didn’t it?
But I never promised that this would be any sort of stretch.
You know me. I’m a play it safe kinda guy.

So this weekend, armed with my new memory, my new skin, a teeny tiny set of small screwdrivers, a pair of tweezers and a 17 page (illustrated with photos) guide to opening my computer, removing the chassis and replacing the RAM, I pimped out my mini.

A sweat, prayer and curse-word filled hour later, it is finished.
Or, in the words of Colin Clive, “It’s alive!”:

We now have the maximum RAMmage:

and we now have the sleek, dangerous, very un-white, black:

I seriously thought I’d bricked the whole computer when I accidentally disconnected the hard drive from the circuit board, then proceeded to break the little plastic thing that held the thin as paper ribbon wire. It was crazy. And fun.

And the computer, while it’s not new, it does look better on my desk and runs faster than freeloading background dancers towards Britney Spears. Even Open Office, a known memory hog, opens up in about 10 seconds, which is probably some sort of land speed record for it.
Until my rich uncle gets out of the poor house, it will just have to dream about getting one of these.

**If you’d like to skin it, you can get 25% off your order by using promo code “SPRING08″. This offer expires on 7/15/08, and no, I don’t get any kickback, I just found the coupon in my order when I got it.