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Ive upgraded quite a few Mac minis over the past several years, from the original 2005 model to the latest version, released last week, and some in between.

Weve also covered the topic of Mac mini surgery on the Macworld Podcast.

But we still regularly receive questions from readers about whether or not performing such upgrades yourself is a good ideamany have heard that its quite difficult to open the Mini, or that doing so voids your warranty.

Apples official policy is that you can upgrade the mini yourself as long as you dont break anything in the process; if you do, that damage isnt covered under warranty.

But how much risk is there of actually doing such damage (It can certainly feel like youre breaking something when you pry off the Mac minis top case.) And once you get inside, how hairy is the disassembly procedure Its difficult to judge by looking at photos on a Web site.

To satisfy your curiosity, in this weeks video, I show you the entire process of upgrading the Mac minis RAM and hard drive, from cracking the case to snapping it back together again, pointing out some of the tricky steps along the way.

Believe it or not, the entire process took me under six minutesand thats including several places where I got slowed down by a tiny screw or spring that didnt want to cooperate.

Or you can look below for the full-quality video embedded from YouTube.

Please note our videos are now available in HD on YouTube as well).

You can view iFixit.coms guides to upgrading the minis RAM ( PDF version ) and hard drive ( PDF version ).

If youre looking to upgrade or repair any other component, iFixit has a complete list of guides for the mini.

In addition to a thin, metal putty knife, I used Newer Technologys 18 11-Piece Portable Toolkit for the procedure.

This is a handy tool set that includes eight screwdrivers (three Torx, two flathead, and two Phillips), two nylon spudgers (the green-plastic pry tool you see in the video), a large set of tweezers, and a scissor clamp.

I placed the new drive in the Express, cloned the minis original hard drive to the new drive, and then swapped the drives.

This let me boot the mini off the new internal hard drive with no down time.

It also let me use the original drive as an external backup drive.

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Best Way To Upgrade Mac For Games