I work as a sys admin for a newspaper that is 97% Mac. We had a Mac mini that had a failed ethernet port and had the hard drive and memory stripped out. I requested and was given these remains.
I dug around in my crap and found and old Lacie external CD firewire case with a bad drive. I removed the drive and replaced it with a 200 GB hard drive. Connected this to the mini with a short firewire cable. I installed a 512 chip that I had around (glad I didn't sell it.) Installed 10.4.8. Mini is now up and running.
I have ordered cables (hdmi to dvi, mini jack to rca) to connect this to my 42" plasma and ordered a bluetooth mouse to control the mini from the couch. $50 total.
What I can do now is use MacTheRipper to copy our favorite DVDs to the hard drive and play them on our TV using DVD Player. The mini will hold 25-40 native DVD movies. We can also play games.
Sweet.
I dug around in my crap and found and old Lacie external CD firewire case with a bad drive. I removed the drive and replaced it with a 200 GB hard drive. Connected this to the mini with a short firewire cable. I installed a 512 chip that I had around (glad I didn't sell it.) Installed 10.4.8. Mini is now up and running.
I have ordered cables (hdmi to dvi, mini jack to rca) to connect this to my 42" plasma and ordered a bluetooth mouse to control the mini from the couch. $50 total.
What I can do now is use MacTheRipper to copy our favorite DVDs to the hard drive and play them on our TV using DVD Player. The mini will hold 25-40 native DVD movies. We can also play games.
Sweet.