<p>I'm leaning very much towards a new Mac Mini w/ 80 G hard drive. It's about $600 w/ free printer and rebates from MacMall. I have a spare monitor and keyboard/mouse.</p>
<p>I'm wondering: Does the Mac Mini have a large enough hard drive to get me through high school? College? I don't wanna do anything extraordinary on it, just homework and internet and stuff (using family computer between others is inconvenient). I'm trying to be kind of economical about it too.</p>
<p>I WILL NOT buy a PC. Very bad experiences. Anyways, is an 80 G hard drive big enough w/o huge externals?</p>
<p>I like computers a lot and from my personal opinion, the Mac Mini is a very bad computer if you are considering using it for the next five years or so. </p>
<p>Personally, the hard drive is alright for you. The hard drive depends on your personal use habits and unless you are huge media downloader, 80G should be OK for just Internet and Homework just as you said. </p>
<p>As for the CPU, should you be buying a Mac Mini at that price, you'd probably be getting an low end Intel dual core, mostly likely from the T2XXX line. You'll also get 1G memory RAM. I personally think that this will be a hideously underpowered computer that will be outdated in a short amount of time. </p>
<p>With the renewed Intel, AMD competition, prices are going down like crazy for high performance CPU's. A Q6600 Quad Core CPU costs about 250 dollars and will outperform your Mini Mac CPU by several times in any synthetic benchmark. Many computers these days can be bought at a decent price with 2G RAM, much advanced 256MB graphics cards, 300G+ hard drives, and other essential hardware. </p>
<p>I think that you have some bad experiences with Windows and not PC's. Mini Mac is a PC(Personal Computer) too! Why not give Windows another try? It's not that bad once they take a few years to work out the bugs.</p>
<p>I'm just waiting for the Intel Nehalem architecture to be in production by the time I go to college. 8 cores... mmm...</p>
<p>However, 80G sounds good for you. Good luck with your new computer.</p>
<p>He said he just wants to surf the internet and do homework. 1GB of ram and a low-end Intel Dual Core processor is more than enough for that. Hell, I'm on a MacBook with a 1.83Ghz Dual Core processor and 512MB, using it for the same purposes that the OP described, and it's lasted me for almost two years.</p>
<p>Unless you are installing 20-30 extra games/programs or a couple full seasons of TV shows and some movies, 80 GB is probably 10x what you need for just doing HW and surfing the web.</p>
<p>It hardly takes anything to run a web browser and a word processor.</p>