Another thread brought back. Sorry about that. I finally got around to checking up on my mom's Mac Mini and I think it's really going to come down to RAM.

First, the Mini is a 2.3GHz Core i5 model w/2GB of 1333MHz DDR3 RAM. It came with Lion installed.

Here was the memory information I observed when the computer was running no more than a freshly-opened instance of Firefox and MS Word:

150MB Free
663MB Wired
916MB Active
339MB Inactive
1.89GB Used

At this state, things were terribly slow. I would say unacceptably slow. Frankly, I was a little shocked that Apple would ship such a product, which is why I'm still expecting it to be a hardware defect of some sort. It really is that slow - the kind of slowness where there's even a delay in text showing up when typing. That's just unacceptable in computing these days for ANY type of shipping product.

The thing that gets me is that this is my mom we're talking about. She's not using CAD software, gaming, video encoding, or anything nearly that intensive. She's browsing the web and creating Word files! Yes, Apple was selling two models (as they still are) when she purchased this computer. She could have gotten the 4GB model with a faster CPU and bigger hard drive. But really, the base model should be better than this, and that's why I'm left thinking it's a defect, because I'd be surprised there wasn't a bigger outcry if Apple were shipping computers this bad...

I'm happy to go order more/replacement RAM if that's everything that I need to do to get this Mini working like an actual computer from the last couple years, but I worry that there's something else wrong, and would rather not waste the money.