Please help, my Mini is eating up all my Ram & suffers from annoying bugs!

Question

Hello
This is my first official post with a few problems as I just got my Mini and as I hear around the boards, there are a number of things wrong with the mini...
Here is my first problem :
My Mini seems to eat up a lot of ram and for some reason, when I quit all of my apps and leave only one or two open it does not go up... Instead it just sits there and if I try to open more apps, it falls dangerously low and I feel the computer is kind of suffering...
On restart it is doing just fine again.
Here are some examples (please click on links to see Activity Monitor images):
The case when it goes bad
http://img93.imageshack.us/img93/1645/ramconsumption6ba.jpg
And this is after restart or startup
http://img489.imageshack.us/img489/3280/ramconsumption25es.jpg
What is eating up all my ram? And why does it not bounce back to the free ram it should have? It is like the apps suddenly double in RAM consumption...
Second problem :
When I start up my mini, each and every time I have to remind the mini to connect to my Airport Express, I have to go to the menu and pull down the menu bar and that is all. I don't even have to select it, cause it does it by its self, but not until I remind it. This is a rather annoying part, I cannot make it understand that it should JUST connect to my Airport setting...
Are there any solutions for this?
Third Problem :
When I startup the mini, the sound is always set to default, meaning it comes through the speakers at half volume. I always set it to full, so that I can control my speakers instead of going both to the mac and my speakers to control my sound setting.
Does anyone have this problem? And how can I fix it?
Also,I can only hear the startup chime via the mini and not via my speakers. Is this a universal problem with the minis? If so I can live with it, though it is pretty annoying.
Fourth Problem :
As I am writing this topic in this forum, my keyboard is kind of slow, it is not reacting as fast as it should. It is set to fast in the preference pane and even the controls of going up and down on a page via the arrow keys don't seem to keep its beat. It does it once and I have to press it how ever many lines I want to go up, unlike before on my G5 I just press and hold the button and it will go as far as I let it before I let it go.
What is that all about?
Fifth Problem :
Though this is a small problem, I don't know if this could be major later. I tend to get digital distortion during my usage of Safari. Certain places, I visit I can see digital distortion. Like when I scroll on CNN.COM. It makes some strange lines and I cannot figure out what is wrong with it...
Now, the mini was once considered to be a cheap investment, but as I found out, I had to go a long way and very close to the price of an iMac to get my Mini to work. See I have an Apple Studio Displace 17 inch ADC. Now, to my surprise, as I was about to hook up my mini to my nice Apple screen (Only a generation old), I was in for a big shock... It was simply not compatible... Not one bit... Leaving me with the bitter taste of having to pay an additional $130 for an DVI to ADC converter. And that really made me angry.
But aside from that, I have to say, I am not certain that I want to keep this mini... I have 10 days, to decide if I want to keep it or not... I can get a full refund if I don't like it... And so far, I am not sure I like it as much as I thought I would...
Rosetta aside, I think it is pretty fast, in all the native Intel apps. So, we'll see if I can eliminate some of these problems and if I can, I will keep it, but I am not sure how many of these problems I am going to need fixed before I seriously want to keep it...
I am going from one problematic G5 Dual 1.8 Powermac to another problematic Apple computer... It can get a little too overwhelming...
So any help anyone can give me at this point, would be very much appreciated...
Dual : G5 1.8 Ghz, MacMini Core Duo, iPod, iPod Shuffle & mini   Mac OS X (10.4.5)   Was the mini the correct decision?

Answer 1

Hi PPC7410!!!
Wow, thank you so much for your post, I really appreciate you taking the time to set a few things straight for me...
And yes, you are right, the Apple Studio Display was bought with my G5 Dual 1.8. So I kind of didn't want to buy a new monitor.
The main reason why I bought the mini now was because I am saving up for a MacBook Pro. I am going mobile soon and need a good computer. But, I want to wait till Apple fixes all the small problems with the MacBook Pros and I hope to get one early next year. And that is where the mini comes into the picture. I need a computer I can have while I save up for the laptop. And while I can still get some decent money for the G5, I am going to sell it and use the money on the laptop. Once I get that, I will give the mini to my father who can use it to keep in touch with me and start his digital life...
But...
A little about why I went with the min in the first place...
I bought a Dual 1.8 G5 PowerMac not long ago, well when it came out. Since day one I had serious problems with it. It was so bad that Apple even sent me a replacement, but that only came back with other problems. The first one had a logic board defect, it just panicked almost all the time... (On each startup there was a good chance my monitor went blue and a lot of cryptic codes were written all over the screen. Even when I tried the hardware test DVD, it couldn't complete it because it went into panic mode and I had to pull the plug cause nothing responded on the G5.)
Ok, so I waited almost 3 weeks for the new one, while I was in the middle of a project (which died because of this), and I was really pulling hairs by this time. So the new Powermac arrived, and I had to return my faulty G5 to where I got it. I live on the 4th floor and no elevators. 2 weeks before I got my G5 my back went out, so I don't have to tell anyone who owns a G5 Powermac just how heavy it is. Perhaps out of the box it wouldn't be so back but the box was big enough to house a small family. The new ones are smaller I see.
Ok, the new one arrived, and it didn't panic or do the things that the other machine did. However it was birthed with entire new set of problems which started to show up a little bit at a time. These problems presented them selves in strange bottleneck results. Applications such as iTunes would suffer with a G5 Dual 1.8 powermac and 1GB of Ram. The specs were directly from Apple. I didn't add anything to it.
A friend of mine has a G4 400mhz and I am telling you, that sometimes, that machines does things FASTER than my G5 Dual 1.8Ghz. That blew my mind...
I have to be honest, the hammer fell hardest when I pre-ordered Apple's Aperture in hopes of really getting some kind of real harmony between my Mac and my Nikon D50. But alas, when I got it, tried to install it, it said it could NOT be installed on my machine!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Yet the Apple seller, on the phone said, SUUUURREE it can, why couldn't it... I thought ; well yeah it is suppose to be the best and fastest mac out there, why would it have a problem with it? But I was wrong... and when I called them telling them that I couldn't install the app, they didn't want to cut me some slack. So I was stuck with Aperture 1.0... It looked good on the shelf, but that is all... It was a waste of money....
To be honest, I simply gave up at that time... I have just had so many problems with the G5 I have, that I wanted to downgrade to something that just did, the normal jobs of everyday work, such as surfing the web, emailing, occasional Photoshopping( With Adobe's press note telling us not to hold our breaths for any Uni-Photoshop this year, kind of feels like a kick in the teeth).
So, I didn't expect much from the mini. I know I couldn't do heavy work on it but all in all, speed wise, it is as fast as my G5 on a good day.
So aside from Rosetta, which is a real drag when you use it, it is a pretty good little machine... Just hope they will sort out these problems sooner than they did with so many other macs with ticks and bugs.
Again, thank you for answering my questions... I didn't quite understand the RAM thing, but you might be right, I just didn't encounter that on my G5...
Take care and have a great day!