I recently decommissioned an old laptop, and salvaged 4GB of laptop ram out of it. Having no other good use to put this to, I wondered if my iTunes isolation mechanism (a very early Mac mini) might be able to be upgraded to Mountain Lion if it had enough ram – it was currently running snow leopard, had a dual-core CPU, all that seemed to be missing was and additional 2GB of RAM, exactly the same kind of RAM I’d just taken out of the decommissioned laptop.
Unfortunately early model mac minis weren’t built to be serviced anywhere outside of factories in china where they were also assembled. Step 1 involved prying open the case with a paint-scraper or similar device. Not having a paint scraper, and not wanting to wait until the effects of whisky wore off, and the realization that I was risking wrecking a good machine for no real gain dawned on me I pressed on with the most similar tool I had to hand – a barbie mate. The brushed aluminium case and the stainless steel sure looked good together.
It worked, after a fashion, and after several other harrowing steps the upgrade was complete. I turned it back on and the machine still worked, but unfortunately the upgrade to mountain lion was prevented by the lack of 64-bit BIOS (I believe – it was never able to boot into 64-bit mode, and I’m going to chalk that up as the cause). Oh well, at least iTunes has a bit more RAM to play with now.