Rebuilding a mac for the first time

After having a little mac mini for over 18 months this evening it's come down to being rebuilt for the first time!

Before getting my mini I'd not used a mac since year 10 work experience when I went to a graphic design company and back then all good graphics software and design was done on the mac os. Back then I think it was version 6 so very much in the PowerPC range of computers. But since then in the past couple of years the PowerPC strangle hold on the mac has relaxed and Intel broke in.

The main reason why I got a mac mini in the first place wasn't because of the new Mac OSX operating system and it wasn't because I was overly looking for stability (although it's nice) ... the reason why I got it was because it was incredibly small, very very quiet and still pretty powerful for what I needed.

I'm not into gaming that much so never needed a beast of a machine with awesome graphics to play the latest games. All I wanted was a machine which I could program on, watch dvds, download stuff and surf the net on. Not much of asking I thought. With the advent of Intel duel core chip being inside it also opened up the possibility of running windows on the machine as well.

I played around with Boot Camp when it came out and installed Vista. Vista performance rating gave it a 3.4 (I think) which was ok; but then looking at the break down of performance it was only that low because of the integrated graphics. The duel core 1.8 Ghz cpu scored 4.5 - 4.7, the 2GB of ram scored highly ... even the speed and performance of the hdd was good. So I was happy!

Anyway, once this is done I'll have the latest build of boot camp to play with and windows will be going back on. The reason ... purely for remote access from work so I can make sure my downloads are good and I can access visual studio 2008 (as we've not upgrade yet ... still waiting!).

But so far so good the install has gone well :-)