Max out your Mac Mini

If you plan on listening to music while you clean the house, you can hear the same audio stream simultaneously, wherever you’re located. If you work from home, using a laptop, you can move around and work in different locations without having to move your sound source with you.

If you play your audio from your laptop, especially if you prefer to keep it in high-quality or uncompressed formats, you may well find yourself using lots of valuable disk space.

For this reason, move your audio from the laptop and keep your hard disk contents for your work and important files.

Best of all, if you use a central server for your multimedia content, you can even get away with not connecting a monitor, keyboard or mouse to the server, except when you need to access it for troubleshooting.

What’s required
For our example, we’re using an original Mac Mini. We know of a few people who were initially hooked on the Apple bug when they saw the Mac Mini, but then realised it was no gaming computer, it shipped with a laptop hard disk and was just too slow for most users.

As it was a fairly low-cost system, it ended up in the back of the wardrobe with other components. Try and sell it and you’ll be lucky if you get a buyer ­ no-one these days seems to want a Power PC-based Mac Mini with 512KB of Ram.

All is not lost, however. The OS X-based Mac Mini can be used as your audio server. If you’re an iTunes user, you need nothing more than iTunes ­ the Windows or Mac version will do ­ configured to share your audio tracks. If you don’t own a Mac Mini, take a look at Apple UK’s refurbished store.

You may be lucky and find a discounted Intel Mac Mini that will enable you to run Mac OS X and Windows on the same machine. We noticed a 1.8GHz example recently, discounted to £299, making it ideal for your home media server. Otherwise, have a look on Ebay ­ good clean examples seem to cost around the £150 to £200 mark.