Mac Mini is a let down

Question

Got a phone call from my family again, seems like they are having more trouble with the Mac Mini.
I downloaded some demos to my flash-drive using my PC, my connection is faster on my laptop, can download Halo Demo in a few minutes, much faster than what my family has, 56k, with the Mac Mini, it is still as slow as downloading anything when they used their old iMac.
Anyway, I gave them a demo of Halo and they said there was a message saying something like, "not enough room, 150 MB is needed" and I guess from what they told me, the Mac Mini they got had only 1 GB of hard drive memory, which is pretty low, I mean no wonder, it is a "mini" computer, but I still expected more. I am kind of disappointed for them.
To make things work, I guess they also need the admin password, which I suppose I kind of subtly suggested for security reasons, as so they do not accidentally install/download anything that could hurt their computer, or them.
On top of all that is their mail is still not working and it took them like 2 hours to get it working.
The biggest issue now however is they need to install OS 9 and the Mac Mini did not come with OS 9.
WHAT IS UP WITH THAT???
SINCE WHEN DID APPLE DENY OS 9???
THAT WAS STANDARD IN MY DAY.
Geeze, Apple.
Perhaps I can use the iBook CDs or something. I am too tired to think straight now. Somebody please help me with these problems. In the meantime I will see if I can get over to them and take a look at it myself.
Emperor Remus

Answer 1

You are correct. The program that they attempted to install was Starcraft and Starcraft: Brood War. I purchased the game nearly 8 years ago and the CD still works fine because I installed it a few days ago on the PC laptop I am using. I managed to get all the updates needed from Battle.net. I gave the CDs to them so they can play against me and prepare for the upcoming release of Starcraft 2. W00t! Starcraft 2!
Apparently however Starcraft is "so old" that it needs to be run on Mac OS 9 or at least needs to be run on Mac OS 9 while running Mac OS X, in a manner of speaking, where you click on an Mac OS 9 application and then that window box shows that Mac OS 9 is loading, all while on the Mac OS X desktop.
There is that possibility it might screw up the Mac Mini, however I do not see why, because I did something like this similar, but with an iBook and it worked perfectly. Then again, Mac Minis are NOT iBooks.
You assume correctly, they get internet through the phone line which goes into a router box and the ethernet cord comes out and connects to the Mac Mini. Which is strange, I thought the Mac Mini DID come with an internal modem...however I should know better, hence the name "mini". The Mac Mini appears to be a MINOR step up from their old iMac, which one of them uses for writing word documents or something. Speaking of which, I found out when I first looked at the Mac Mini when I visited them that Apple did not include any word software, like Appleworks or Clarisworks.
God, Apple is getting sloppy. Good thing the Mac Mini was a GIFT. I would hate to be a poor sap to actually purchase the piece of poop, NO OFFENSE!!!
WHAT!? I never said their e-mail was working. It is still NOT working. Well it is really the MAIL on the Mac Mini that is not working, same thing, they can not access their e-mail.
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1548480&tstart=0
OR look at this:
My family's Mac Mini Mac OS 10.5 mail is not working. From what the told me, something happened to the mail icon and it was replaced by a question mark. One day the mail icon stopped working. They attempted to reinstall the software using the CDs that came with the Mac Mini, but it did not work.
In addition, I talked to them earlier about upgrading to 10.5.3, but I presume that this mail problem is getting in the way of that, because they said they tried to download 10.5.1 but the site would not let them, or something like that.
Emperor Remus