Can I upgrade my Mac mini kid 2011 to more than 16 gb of memory? (8 on each slot)

My response is "Why do you want to add RAM?"

If your computer is slow, it is more likely the factory hard drive that a shortage of RAM. If the HD is the Issue, adding massive amounts of RAM won't make a difference.

The quick evaluations consists of three questions:

1) Is the computer slow to start up?

2) Do app take a long time to launch?

3) Once launched, do the apps seem to run fine?

Three "yes" answers strongly suggest a drive issue that adding RAM won't fix..

If you wish us to give a data-drive analysis of the issues with specific recommendations for how to possibly how to improve performance, please post a sytem config snapshot. Fortunately there is a safe, secure way to do that without our playing a protracted game of "20 Questions" that could go on for days.

We can quickly and within the confines of these forums help you determine what issues are at play if you use EtreCheck Pro, available here:

https://etrecheck.com/index

The free version will do nicely for this purpose, although the app is worthy of our financial support.

We can see hard data about drive performance, software issues, and RAM usage. Etrecheck is the development of a long-serving and trusted contributor here expressly for displaying information in these forums to help us help you. It will not reveal any personal or secure information.

Run it, select “Report" from the left-hand pane (scroll down to the bottom of that pane to find):

When its report displays, click the "Share Report" icon from EtreCheck’s toolbar and then "Copy report” from the resulting dropdown.

⚠️ Please DO NOT highlight the text in the report before using Etrecheck’s “Copy report” command—that will garble the formatting and make the report slower and harder to evaluate.

NOTE: Changes in late 2018 to the forum software require you use the “Additional Text" icon (see example below) to embed the long report into a post:

Paste the report into the resulting “Additional Text” window:

EtreCheck often allows us to solve issues with only one more post on your part.

You can't and I know that since I own one.

+1 Nope!

The 2010, 2011 and 2012 Mac mini's all have a 2x8GB = 16GB limit.