[GreyPaint]

Finished updating mine at about midnight.
Runs much faster than XP - safari is really fast.
I have an 8GB - 1Gb system
Trimmed a Leopard install onto an external USB first - got it down to 5.2Gb with iWork09, Skype, Real Player, iStumbler, Google Earth and some shareware and iPhoto.
Now configuring to scale System Preferences to 70%, mail and other stuff onto an SD drive - leaving a working system
I am well chuffed!

[zen]

Originally Posted by UnaClocker

It's great. In the benchmarks, it scores about the same as the same speed G4 Mac. It'll play 3d games (most 3d games for Mac are a bit dated, which is perfect.. haha), most video is no problem (Netflix via Silverlight is reported to suck, but that's why I have a Roku, and a real computer). Hulu plays great.
Just make sure you have 2gb of ram installed, 2gb is the sweet spot for Leopard.

I agree pretty much 100%. The Atom CPU does seem pretty equal mhz for mhz with a G4. My mini 9 is much faster than my G4 1GHz file server with 2MB L3.

2GB RAM may be a sweet spot for a mini 9 running OS X since thats the max RAM it can hold but from personal experience I would say 4GB is the true sweet spot.

[halu2047]

I did a "race" this morning. The two contestants:

1. iMac 2.16GHz Core2Duo, 2.5 GB ram
2. Mini 9 1.6 atom, 2 GB ram

So I turned on both machine at the same time. The desktop appeared on the Mini 5 seconds quicker than on the iMac!

In terms of internet browsing, Mini and iMac are equally fast (I run Minefields on both machines).
I will try something more intensive with Mini to see if it performs!

[dndrich]

How about things like usb ports and video ports? I am interested in making my own Dell Mini 9 Mac for my wife. She needs the thing to just work. From what I can tell, if you disable legacy USB support the thing wakes and sleeps fine. I plan to get the RunCore 32 gig SSD and 2 gigs of RAM. So if I disable legacy USB support, does that mean that the USB ports won't work at all while running OS X? Any other functional issues to be aware of?

[WolfKeeper]

Originally Posted by dndrich

How about things like usb ports and video ports? I am interested in making my own Dell Mini 9 Mac for my wife. She needs the thing to just work. From what I can tell, if you disable legacy USB support the thing wakes and sleeps fine. I plan to get the RunCore 32 gig SSD and 2 gigs of RAM. So if I disable legacy USB support, does that mean that the USB ports won't work at all while running OS X? Any other functional issues to be aware of?

Legacy USB support is used to support attached USB devices while the computer is in POST (turning it on through initial loading of the operating system), in non-plug'n'play environments like diagnostics, BIOS setup, etc. Once the OS is installed, you can disable it.