Jeff said:
BTW, can the 512MB ram take the load from Adobe CS? I do some photo editing and sometimes the file size can be quite big. Just used to plenty of RAMs in windows. Really, it gonna be my PS machine soon.
Unfortunately, I don't have PS-CS installed on the Mac as I only have the PC version licence.
Unless you are regularly churning out A1-sized spreads, I don't think that PS-CS will tax the Mac mini too much for normal image editing (resizing, straightening, sharpening, etc). As a general rule, PS-CS normally requires 3-4x the size of the file you are working on to keep it in memory. A 6-megapixel image (3000x2000 pixels) is roughly 17.2MB in size (according to PS-CS); and thus to keep the image comfortably in memory, you need to allocate a minimum of 50-60MB of memory to PS-CS to avoid swapping to disk.
Best way to gauge is to keep an eye on the
Efficiency and
Scratch Sizes readings on the bottom left of the PS-CS screen (selectable from the list that inlcudes Doc Size, Doc Dimensions, Timing and a couple of others.
Efficiency reading less than 100% means that some kind of paging to disk is occuring; and
Scratch Size indicates the size of the scratch/paging file being used for undos. Ideally,
Efficiency should be 100% all the time. As for
Scratch Size it is probably advisable to attach an external FireWire hard disk to the Mac mini to act as Scratch as the internal hard disk of the mini may be slow (understand that it is 4200rpm for the 80GB version and 5200rpm for the 40GB version). Getting an external FireWire enclosure with a 7200rpm HD will speed things up nicely.
Caveat: All the above information is given without any
current direct experience with Photoshop CS on the Mac mini, but rather based on past experience with Photoshop Ver 1/2/3/4 on older Macintosh systems.