Having a Mac repaired, Part 2
Just as expected before, I was called by the local Mac store the next day to pick up my Mac Mini.
Apparently, the graphics adapter was broken, so they just replaced the mainboard and put the rest of the components back in. So I could finally upgrade to 1 GB of RAM and the system works like a charm again.
It was clearly a warranty case, so I did not have to pay anything. — Lucky me, as the replacement mainboard is worth $361,- as stated on the repair report!
Fortunately, also all my data is still there, so they did not tamper with the harddrive. At least not much: The technician was obviously intimidated by the Linux bootloader I used for dual-booting my system, so as sensitively as a goat to an endangered mountain flower, he nailed the original OS X bootloader back on the system. — If he mentions that in his resume, Microsoft will immediately hire him.
However, currently I am working on OS X again and I can say, the difference in speed is enormous. How can an Operating System swallow more than 500 megabytes of RAM at any given moment? It’s just unbelievable. That being said, after the RAM upgrade, Mac OS X actually became usable and it starts being fun: I don’t stumble on the totally unlogical keyboard shortcuts so often anymore 
You see, everything’s alright in Mac Mini land again!
You could open “Aktivitäts-Anzeige” (no idea what it’s called in English) and look for your memory eaters — Kernel takes 78MB physical memory, Firefox 60, Mail 20, Quicksilver 20, Vienna 20, Adium 20, iCal 16, Yahoo!Widgets 12… Well… After all that seems to be a far smaller amount than the 1024MB available…
At least swapping was minimized absolutely acceptable state with 1GB… I don’t need any HD swapping at all when I avoid starting such monsters as Micro$oft Word et al.
Thanks, I will try that. I just installed OpenOffice 2 and X11 yesterday and it also didn’t seem to swap to disk when I started it. Very nice!
But, considering that it constantly swapped before, some applications apparently ate a lot of memory so that it exceeded the 500 megs pretty easily.
I’m glad it works, Fred. Now you can sit there and keep hitting ctl+alt+openapple+8 without having to worry about speed.