Help, it feels slooow: Mac Mini 2012 2.3 Quad Core 1TB 4GB

Question

Hi, I already posted this on another forum but I haven't got any feedback yet, I hope I'm luckier here :-)
I'm a long time Mac user. Last week I bought a new Mac Mini 2.3 i7 1Tb Quad Core.
Now, having left the OS X platform years ago when my good old G5 started feeling pretty old for more modern systems and programs, and having used a cheap basic Asus notebook in the meantime, I was really expecting the Mac Mini to fly. Well, to be honest I'm quite puzzled right now: it just feels it's lagging so often, that it doesn't feel that different to my 10 year old G5 running 10.5.
Things like opening System Preferences take an awful long time, often just going to the upper menu and clicking on things I get the dreadful spinning ball, switching between tabs in a browser, and in general the machine (especially considering it's basically new, I didn't even install anything serious on it yet, like Logic Pro, etc) feels definitely not responsive enough for a 2012 quad core.
I know, no SSD and still only the stock 4gb of Ram, but tell me this can't be true. I did some quick check with Disk First Aid and everything looks ok, I fixed permissions too.
I unchecked the "put hd to sleep when possible", but no improvement. I tried also a safe boot, but that didn't tell me much. Of course the machine feels a tad snappier, but it's hard to compare.
I was also surprised to see how slow and laggy Photoshop CS 6 felt even just working on pretty small images, (I'm just trying a 30 days demo), I mean, we're talking of a Quad Core. It's funny 'cause I was expecting it to be day and night to my G5 and that crappy notebook of a few years ago, and it doesn't feel like that. I know, apples and oranges, but still...
So these days I've just used things like Chrome (terribly RAM hungry, I know), Spotify, Open Office here and there, Text Wrangler, things like these...
Oh, the machine came with 10.8.3, now I'm on 10.9, but to be honest I didn't experience significant differences (actually I updated hoping it would have solved the problem).
So, before I return this Mac Mini, please tell me about your real life experiences with a similar configuration, and give me any advice you may have. I'd be really grateful, I don't want to end up buying another PC :-)

Answer 1

Wow, that has me worried as I've been waiting for the new mini. It seems nuts to me that any mac ships with 4Gb RAM these days!
I would recommend that you get at least 8Gb of RAM into your mini ASAP. If you go to the Activity Monitor app you can look for "Page outs" or "Swap Used" and that will show if your mac is having to transfer data from your RAM to your HDD - seriously slowing down the machine. With just 4Gb and Adobe CS your mac is probably doing a lot of it and really struggling. If you have the cash then an SSD will be awesome but to me, RAM is the priority - and you can do it yourself easily.
Just to highlight the differences, here's the effect of different upgrades for me, hopefully that will help with your decision
I have a mid 2010 13" MBP and it shipped with 4Gb / 250Gb 5400rpm HDD.
I updated the memory to 8Gb in 2011/2 and put in a WD Black 7200rpm HDD. That was a massive improvement that could easily be seen when using a different MBP in the original specs (my boss bought 2 so I could see them side by side). Startup was improved by a good margin but apps - especially multiple apps open - were much happier and zippy. I could have all my apps open whereas my boss had to close anything he wasn't using.
About 2 months ago I added a 120Gb SSD from OWC and the difference is massive again. The machine knocked 45 seconds off the boot time and opening/saving/closing apps and files are almost instant, even on the old sata bus. It doesn't affect how many apps I can have open, it just does anything disk related a whole lot quicker.