The airport card for the A1176 has two connecting posts for antenna cables. These are visible in the photos for steps 17 and ...

I just purchased a used Mac Mini (A1176) which I had been told had trouble making wireless connections. I suspected the airpo...

I played around with these connections before sealing my machine back up. With no antenna cabled onto the tiny bluetooth board, I found I was unable to discover my Mac from my adjacent cell phone. But the bluetooth capability still showed up in the System Profiler, of course, despite the lack of a signal. So then I popped the connector off of that bluetooth board and connected the antenna to the "Aux" post on the Airport Extreme card. As I'd suspected, the System Profiler then couldn't find any bluetooth subsystem at all. So, the verdict: the Bluetooth board is the correct place to attach the secondary antenna in the A1176, despite some confusion. (At least one person is confused, since I got my used Mini with the Bluetooth antenna attached to the "Aux" post). Whether attaching a secondary antenna to the "aux" port might help the Mini get a strong signal is something I didn't look into. The idea Ralph found at maclife.com of threading an aux antenna out of the back is intriguing though, especially since I get...

Good to hear; I'm going to try the same thing. The mostly-working Mac Mini A1176 I just picked up also has a failing optical drive. It seems to have no problem with CDs and CDRs; occasionally reads DVDs and DVD-ROMs but usually spits 'em back out, and never accepts DVD-Rs or DVD+R/DLs (purple substrate). The existing drive claims to be a Matshita UJ-846-C (aka Panasonic) and is also labeled Apple Super 846CA. Checks seem to indicate the UJ846C costs around $50 on eBay and more at retail (although it seems to cost $199.95 here on ifixit). But several Panasonic UJ-846-Bs are selling for much less over on eBay, so I'm going to try that first.

If one wasn't planning on repairing, and thus didn't have to be delicate, could two massive suction cups on opposing flat surfaces pop this open without, for example, breaking open the batteries?

I'm learning from cpu-world.com that the Core Duo (and Core Solo) are 32-bit architecture, whereas the Core 2 Duo is a 64-bit design. Does this matter in any way?