[pwalker8]

Just ordered a refurbished mac mini 2014, 1 TB hard drive and 8 GB memory on Amazon. $400 isn't a bad price. You may ask why a 2014 mac mini. I'll tell you (extra points if you catch the reference). 2014 is the most recent mac mini that runs Sierra which is the last version of Mac OS that certain tools I use work with. This is to replace a mac mini that isn't 64 bit compatible, so it will only go up to El Capitan. So the faster machine with a 1 GB Ethernet and 64 bit should be a lot faster. We will see. The tools ran a lot faster on my 2015 iMac before I upgraded to High Sierra, so I have hope.

I ran into a couple of books on Amazon that I couldn't download to my computer. They were not compatible with my Amazon kiindle eInk devices. Sigh. Both books were available on the Apple book store. I was able to download them from Apple and remove the DRM with no problem that way. One of the books, the Princeton guide to Dinosaurs is a lot more readable on a 27 inch iMac.

If everything goes ok, I might use this as my planned media server. I don't actually need a lot of processing power, just something with reasonable speed that can be hooked up to a fairly fast external hard drive with lots of space. First things first, though.