How much memory

Question

OK... have decided on a mini. Will probably buy used... I will use the Mac Mini for web surf and email with business apps on another machine. No video, no games, etc. on the mini. I am also included to the Intel Core 2 processor set.
I see these boxes for sale with between 256 megs and 2 gig of memory. While more memory is always nice to have, it limits the selection of machines and raises the price. I am not familiar with Mac OS X but I am familiar with Win XP as my puny PC only came with 128 megs of memory and wouldn't run until I upgraded to 256 megs (all the cheap PC controller could control). What is the basic amount of memory I would want to websurf and email, etc.

Answer 1

The simplest answer to this is:
For a PPC Mac mini, 512Mb will give you reasonably good performance, allow multiple apps and allow you to run just about anything. 1Gb is the maximum in these systems, and would be better, but not dramatically.
For an Intel mini, the realistic lower limit for good performance is 1Gb. 512Mb RAM in an Intel mini will work and it'll give you acceptable performance on 'native' applications as long as you only run one or two at a time at most, but as soon as you run a non-native application, such as the current version of Word or Excel, the system will slow very noticeably. Even with 1Gb, it'll still slow down, but not so seriously.
In intel minis, the maximum RAM is 2Gb for the Core Solo and Core Duo models, and 3Gb for the Core 2 Duos. In each case, maxing out the RAM will not necessarily give you a faster system, just a generally more responsive one where MacOS will tend to feel more seamless.