02 May 2009

Upping the Ante

Coming from a vacation for which I'd spent a crazy amount c/o my credit card, I'm currently broke. I shouldn't be spending anymore but guess what? The geek, or should I say, geekette in me prevailed causing me to get a stick of 2 GB DDR2 for my MacBook Mini which I paid for cash.

Bye bye Php 1,400! On with my new 2GB DDR2 PC-667 stick of RAM.

Upgrading the HP Mini 1000's RAM is a no brainer. Even if I were completely the girly frilly type of girl, I wouldn't have much problem actually installing RAM - the Mini has an access panel that's specifically for a task such as this. And absolutely no chance of losing those tiny screws! :)

(Credits to myhpmini.com)










































Now that that part's done, I proceeded with booting up the Mini not only to see if the installation went okay but more importantly if Mac OS X would still run fine. I was prepared for the worst to happen - kernel panics and all that. But, to my surprise and relief, the MacBook Mini behaved well - even better than the MacBook Wind after a RAM upgrade. (Click here for the story)

I checked if the system recognized the 2 GB stick by clicking on the About Mac. My previous customized CPU definition that I set via OSX86 Tools was reset to "1.6 GHz Unknown" but it said "2 GB DDR SDRAM" alright. So far so good.

My main motive was to see if upgrading the memory to 2 GB would really resolve the sleep issue - on 10.5.6, sleep means putting the mini on a comatose, never to be woken up again but by forcing it to shut down through the power button. And here's what I've observed:

1st try: I closed the mini's lid. The blue led for BT and WiFi completely went out, leaving the white power and HDD led lit (if remember right, the HDD led was flashing a bit). I push the lid back up and the mini woke up instantaneously. Trackpad and keyboard were working fine.

2nd try: Same results as the 1st one.

3rd try: Comatose! Just like when RAM was just 1 GB; BT & WiFI blue led turned to pink. Screen remained blank/dead when I opened up the lid and trackpad indicator became red and not working. Keyboard was also dead. I was left with no other option but to force the mini to shut down using the power button.

Why I'm having varied results is still an enigma to me. It could be the VoodooPS2Controller kext causing such unstable behavior so I'll have to revert to the default ApplePS2Controller kext I had initially.

This is getting a bit out of hand already - with all the kexts, tweakings stuff etc. that I no longer have track of - I'm seriously considering a fresh start.

No where did I put that ol' hard drive OS X installer of mine?

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