The first question is, "Can you upgrade your Mac Mini 2006?" The answer is YES.
Is it worth to upgrade? Well, not much but at least you can increase the processing power of your Mac Mini and extend its usability to the needs of modern computing.
I have this Mac Mini from the office and I am planning to make it as my Home Theater Computer. Well, many people have their HTPC on Windows, Linux, and even with a Raspberry Pi. I will do mine with Mac's Snow Leopard. You might ask me, "Why SL? Can't you go further with Lion or Mountain Lion? Well, I want to use Frontrow and if it is not satisfying, I might go with Plex on Mac. All I can say is that this project will be very interesting and I believe many people out there are also interested having a upgraded Mac Mini 2006.
I have this Mac Mini from the office and I am planning to make it as my Home Theater Computer. Well, many people have their HTPC on Windows, Linux, and even with a Raspberry Pi. I will do mine with Mac's Snow Leopard. You might ask me, "Why SL? Can't you go further with Lion or Mountain Lion? Well, I want to use Frontrow and if it is not satisfying, I might go with Plex on Mac. All I can say is that this project will be very interesting and I believe many people out there are also interested having a upgraded Mac Mini 2006.
There are three things that you can upgrade on your Mac Mini. Those are the hard drive, memory, and the processor.
An original Mac Mini especially the early 2006 (MA206LL/A) model has a core duo in it (not core 2 duo), which is only a 32-bit processor. It has also 512MB of memory only and 80GB of storage.
What you can do is to upgrade those three parts. First, for the processor, you can look for a core 2 duo socket M processor which is a much better processor than core duo only. There are lots of used socket M processors on eBay. The best that you could have would be the T7600 but I believed the T7200 are a lot cheaper.
For the memory, I think you can only put up to 2GB of RAM on this model. You can also look for 2 sticks of 1GB DDR2 667MHz Mac Mini memories on eBay.
Lastly, you can find lots of hard drives for Mac Mini on eBay. However, if you have budget for SSD, it would dramatically increase boot speed.
Your problem now is how to open your Mac Mini and put these hardware inside. Well, you can start watching the video now.
The guide is actually inspired from a video of guy who named his YouTube channel "HearsGear," credits to him.
