Michael Young [81nassau]

I recently tried installing gvim on my mac (highly disappointing) and accidentally wiped out my old .vimrc file in the process. The old .vimrc file had the settings to enable color syntax. So after uninstalling gvim, I was left with the default vim (v6.2) with no color syntax. Easy enough to fix, so I searched google for the settings, since I can never remember them. There are plenty of posts which will tell you to do the following to enable color syntax from vim:

:set term=builtin_beos-ansi
:syntax on


This gave me some weak syntax coloring/markup, where the only coloring was red and most of the code in a file (I was looking at a php file) was underlined. So, I set the term to “ansi” and it fixed things nicely.

:set term=ansi
:syntax on


Drop those lines into your ~/.vimrc file (without the colons) and you should be set…. assuming you have all of the syntax files installed on your machine.

I picked up a Mac Mini in back in January — the 1.25 GHz, 256 Megs Ram, 40 Gig hard drive version. It’s a nice machine and I’m happy to finally be using OS X, but it’s definitely slow. OS X is a memory hog and the 256 Megs of ram doesn’t quite cut it. If I’m using Eclipse for some Java work, the machine grinds to a halt. Trying to use Eclipse, Firefox, Apache/Tomcat, iTerm (and maybe throw in iTunes) at the same time — not a chance. Switching from app to app takes forever.

So, this weekend, I picked up a gig of RAM from crucial for a little over $100 (the 1 GIG DDR PC2700). I think it was $200+ when I looked back in January… The RAM arrive today (two days, free delivery), so I went down to the local hardware store and grabbed a small putty knife ($5 for the 1 1/4″ size, flexible) to help open up the mini case.

There are plenty of sites and videos out there showing how to crack open the case. This one from macsales.com shows how to crack open the case, upgrade the ram and hard drive. If you’re going to open up your case, definitely check out one of these videos online before doing it. It was pretty easy to do — the tricks being 1) getting the putty knife in the side of the case to pry it open (you have to force it) and 2) getting everything lined up when closing the case back up. You can swap out the RAM without unscrewing anything (after you open up the case). All-in-all, it probably took only a few minutes…

Below are a few pictures of the process. The machine is running smoothly now with the new RAM — I highly recommend the upgrade if you have a mini. And with RAM prices that low (you can probably find a gig for $80-ish), why not?