Today I sat down with my two new, shiny 2GB sticks of DDR3-RAM, so I could live with my Mini, since 1GB is, as it turns out, far too little. I knew it was a bit tiny, but not exactly how much I would miss those gigabytes.

All the guides I’ve found have recommended to use a putty knife, but I was unable to find one anywhere in the house. Looked at a few pictures, and realized that it should work fine with a regular butter knife we use. And it did. There’s a few scratch-marks below, but they’re not really visible. Opening the Mac was a bitch, and so was getting the lid attached again. But the rest of it went pretty smooth.

Then I found the RAM.

Turns out I have two sticks of 240-pins DDR3-SDRAM, while the Mini wants 204-pins DDR3-SDRAM. No one told me that! (Also, I didn’t think about that they came in more than one size.)

So that was a big failure. Closed it up and booted. And there was no audio. Luckily, that was fixable. Turns out a small connector had come loose, so once I attached that, it worked fine again. Now I’m about to return my two sticks and get them replaced with two that actually fit in the Mini. Too bad those were a bit more expensive. And I have to pay the transporting both ways. Which is also expensive.

Lesson learned: Be absolutely sure you’ve found the right parts before ordering