It's Tuesday. Dinner is cooked, eaten and washed up. The girlfriend is watching some shit on the telly. What do you do? I dunno, but here's what I did. I took my mac mini apart.

Alright, there is some motive for my decision. Luke bought me a Mac Mini about 18 Months ago as a "gift", in return for some work (not done yet). This is reason enough to rip it apart, because little did I know at the time, but a substantial gift in exchange for work done means that you cannot charge for that work afterward. You bastard Luke!

Back to the Mac. The Mac is great, I've made the switch, and I no longer have a PC. But it's pissing me off a bit lately. There's no wireless, and the usb ez connect wireless dongle I have doesn't have mac drivers. The ram is 512Mb and is getting a bit hammered at the moment, especially when iPhoto is open (jesus that app sucks almighty).

I wanted to see if I could get that Airport Extreme Card, because there was nowhere on the web that would tell me for sure. The tools needed for this are a a little phillips screwdriver and a putty knife. The manual I was using said to sharpen it, but I got away without doing that.

Below is the Mac with the top cover off, the cd slot thingy unscrewed and in the top left, and the putty knife on the left.

Check out this arty photo below. It's all angle-ey and the lighting mental and cool and shit. Wow. I should get paid for this. You can also see the little screws that I took out of the top casing to remove it. One note on this, they are initally not very tightly screwed so be sure when replacing them not to tightly screwed. The only reason for this is at a later stage you may want to take them out again, so ringing the screws will not help.

There was one little thing I noticed. I am not sure if it was intentional, but the power cable is taped to the top cd slot thingy. I think this may have been intentional, so to remove any part of the internals, the power must be removed from the mainboard. This is a nice little thought from apple. Well, I think so anyway. Obviously, most people would have it plugged out before doing this, but just incase.

When you are taking a tiny machine apart. A tiny machine with tiny screws and delicate bits and bobs, what's the best thing to do? That's right. VACUUM. My girlfriend starts up the hoover and is lifting the table corners and my feet to "clean up". It looked f*cking clean already. Jees!

I found the slot where the Airport Extreme card sits, so I am confident I can buy it and install it without any bother. My OS (10.4) already has the airport configuration software for it, so it should be plug and play. I'll update you in a few weeks on this front.

I also wanted to double check the ram, so I could find a suitable replacement. A cheap one from a third party vendor. What's great is that it is a full size ram chip, so not too difficult to replace. Here are the details: 512Mb DDR - 400MHz - CL3. Note that the Mac Mini is will only take a max of 1Gb Ram and there is only 1 slot, so the 512Mb chip will be made redundant unless eBay can do anything with it.

I successfully got all the internal parts back in without any issues. I did find it a little difficult getting the outer casing back on the base. Simple clicking it back in didn't really work, so I clicked in the front joints first and applied a bit of extra pressure to the get rest clicked back in.

For such a compact device, it isn't too difficult to take a look inside, but it is important to take your time and consult some sort of intructions with photos. The photo below shows the back of the casing. I clicked in the further side from this first and then the rest sat easily enough.

Below, back where she belongs. With my 19", my Icy Box and Bob Marley. Don't you love Mac keyboards, they're so trendy and white.

To summarize, not too difficult to take a peek and easy to upgrade. BTW, my new mantra, one which has come from a bit of a personal budget crisis. Don't buy new, upgrade what you've got.