Well, it turns out that all the people Tom Morris, who commented on my troubles with a mac minis was right, and that I could without too much trouble open up a mac mini. There are only eleven screws and two bits of sticky tape that must be removed to get out the hard disk, once the plastic lid has been popped off. So now all I need is a fresh 2.5 inch IDE hard drive, and a set of Mac PowerPC system disks — I don’t think I threw away my mother’s — and then there is a new mac. Do PC keyboards work, I wonder?
Jonathan Lundell comments that Apple software is cheaper than I had reported,. Well, yes, if you buy the American versions. But the British ones are priced around the standard computer exchange rate of £1=$1.00. Some are a bit cheaper: iWork is $79 or £55.00 ($105.00). Amazon doesn’t seem to sell a student/teacher edition of Office in this country, and Word alone goes for £175.00 ($330.00) on the mac …
Can you buy in $ from Amazon.com? I’ve done the opposite, buying from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.de; the shipping was reasonable, as I recall, at least for books and CDs.
In fact, my first purchase from Amazon.co.uk was a copy of Darwin Wars, before it was available here.
Of course, you don’t get it overnight.
If you want to get the Student/Teacher version it’s £99 from the Apple Store UK (and this without an Education discount because I didn’t log on from campus). Would that work for you? Seriously though, Office should be bundled with all systems… it’s crap that anyone would have to buy it since it’s pretty much the standard.