As I mentioned last week, I ordered a Mac Mini to tide me over while my ailing Powerbook goes in for surgery. Now that I’ve had the chance to play with it it’s a pretty nifty bit of kit, although setting it up wasn’t entirely smooth. A few random notes:

* Bit of a quality control problem: the DVI to VGA adaptor is broken, which means I couldn’t hook the Mini up to my monitor. Luckily the Powerbook uses the same adaptor, so I was able to grab that. I was really pissed off about it, though, which is daft: it’s only a cheap component after all, and it’s not unusual for such things to be broken. I think the problem is that I’m so used to Apple’s “it just works” experience that when something goes wrong, you’re more upset than you would be if you’d bought a Dell.

* The Mini can be a pain in the arse if you don’t have an Apple mouse and Keyboard. On boot, the Mini informed me that it couldn’t recognise my keyboard (a MacAlly IceKey) and promptly hung. Replaced the IceKey with an Apple keyboard and the mouse stopped working. Managed to get the “recognising your keyboard” screen without a system hang, downloaded icekey drivers and finally got the Mac to talk to my keyboard – a process that took over an hour. Ech.

* The Migration Assistant is brilliant: files, apps, network settings transferred across perfectly. Takes *hours*, though.

* Minis need RAM. Lots of RAM. This one’s got a 1.42GHz processor and half a gig of RAM; I reckon it needs double the RAM to be useful.

* Having an Apple logo on the top of the case that doesn’t light up seems wrong, somehow.

* The Mini really is hilariously small. I laughed when I took it out of the box.

* Does anyone actually play the games you get free with your Mac?

* People slag off Windows for the number of updates you need when you first buy a PC. When I connected the Mini to my Airport network, it downloaded about 200MB of updates – system, QuickTime, iPod etc etc etc. Thank god for broadband.

And, er, that’s it.