My memory and hard drive came in this morning so I spent lunch upgrading the hard drive and memory. The Mini came with 1 Gig of DDR3 1066 memory on one stick.. now that I have 4 gigs on 2 sticks I’ll be able to use dual channel and have more memory bandwidth..which makes sense why my memory score in Windows 7’s Experience Score was so low for that parameter (I was wondering at the time why it was so low). I should have good (at least better!) numbers for memory now.
Also I replaced the stock 5200rpm 160 gig drive with a Seagate Momentus 7200 rpm 320 GB drive which should improve the experience as well–especially if I record multiple tracks. The hard drive, to be honest, was an afterthought. The memory upgrade was much, much more high on the priority list.
I’ll post the Windows Experience scores sometime tonight or this weekend.
This upgrade cost me $160.97 from NewEgg.com and $2.96 + tax for a putty knife (to open the case )