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Author Topic: iMac mostly dead. Opinions?  (Read 2385 times)

Ken Bennett

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iMac mostly dead. Opinions?
« on: October 27, 2013, 09:04:54 am »

Greetings,

My late-2009 27-inch iMac is mostly dead. Given the symptoms, I'm thinking the hard drive is bad. I have an appointment this afternoon at the Genius Bar for confirmation, but at this point it won't even boot (though Disk Utility says the drive is fine. Sure.)

So if it's the drive, I can either replace the drive or get a new computer, right? This iMac is not my primary photo computer -- it's my personal machine at home, where I keep all my personal photos. It's the basic 3.06 gHz Core Duo processor, 8GB of RAM, nothing special -- but when it was running, it was plenty fast enough for what I needed: Lightroom 4, Photoshop CS4, and all the usual word processing and internet tasks. I have about 40,000 photos in my personal archive, and run an Epson 3800 which sees a lot of use.

I'm trying to figure out how much money to throw at a four year old base-model computer before it's worth just buying a new one. I think I'm capable of replacing the drive by myself. I know it's a challenge, but I've done this sort of work to a lot of other computers, so once I manage to get the thing apart, it should be fine. A new drive is less than $100 (for a 2TB internal 3.5 inch), so that's not much money to waste and I can always use the drive elsewhere.

If I replaced it, I'd just get the base model quad core i5. Can't really justify a super processor version for this particular use. So my choices are, new and much faster computer for a lot of money, or a difficult but not too expensive repair. Either way I am spending a couple of days re-installing everything.

Thoughts? Suggestions? Thanks in advance.
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Manoli

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Re: iMac mostly dead. Opinions?
« Reply #1 on: October 27, 2013, 09:24:35 am »

I can either replace the drive or get a new computer, right? […] So my choices are, new and much faster computer for a lot of money, or a difficult but not too expensive repair. Either way I am spending a couple of days re-installing everything.

Computers are, to a degree, personal preference but if you do have to trash your current computer (iMac) you'll be wasting a monitor in the process. I would have thought that a new hard drive would be the most economical. Personally, I always favour separating computer from monitor for exactly this reason - modularity rules !

Perhaps consider a mac-mini and a monitor (either a cinema display to match your iMac) or another make - depends on your requirements. Don't think there's a great difference in price and the mini is a versatile machine.

From what you say it seems this time round you've 'only' got a hard disk problem. Think if it was the other way round and your monitor had died (not unknown with Apple) - then the whole computer would have been more or less worthless ! Good luck.
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Ken Bennett

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Re: iMac mostly dead. Opinions?
« Reply #2 on: October 27, 2013, 10:00:10 am »

Thanks. I could get a Mac Mini and use the current iMac as an external display for now. That would be pretty affordable, actually. Then get a decent display down the road. The only downside to that is it locks me into either a Mini or a Mac Pro in the future -- one is slow and cheap and unexpandable, the other is fast and very expensive. But yeah, I knew going in that combining the computer and the monitor was an issue in the long term.

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jduncan

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Re: iMac mostly dead. Opinions?
« Reply #3 on: October 28, 2013, 08:04:32 am »

Thanks. I could get a Mac Mini and use the current iMac as an external display for now. That would be pretty affordable, actually. Then get a decent display down the road. The only downside to that is it locks me into either a Mini or a Mac Pro in the future -- one is slow and cheap and unexpandable, the other is fast and very expensive. But yeah, I knew going in that combining the computer and the monitor was an issue in the long term.



Hi,

What about  this:
1. Buy your new computer  (and iMAC 27" or the mac mini).
2. Change the hard drive of the old one  (if that's the only thing that it has).
3. Sale the old one.  Prices in ebay are not that bad for 2009  27" models.

The nvidia graphics will  help a lot with Adobe software (cuda). That will make the difference between the iMAC and the Mac mini. Notice that the  New iMACs and minis don't have thunderbolt two, but if you wait one year more the price of your old iMAC will drop.

Hope it helps,

J. Duncan
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Ken Bennett

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Re: iMac mostly dead. Opinions?
« Reply #4 on: October 28, 2013, 08:21:23 am »

Thanks -- that's a good idea. As far as I can tell, it's just the hard drive, as it will boot and run just fine from an external FW drive.
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george2787

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Re: iMac mostly dead. Opinions?
« Reply #5 on: October 29, 2013, 08:11:20 am »

Greetings,
-- but when it was running, it was plenty fast enough for what I needed

So if it's the hard drive and you replace it it will be the same system you were happy about. I'll give that a try and if you feel that you need/want more you can always sell it and look for other options while you have an actual computer to work on.

just my 0.02  ;)
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Ken Bennett

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Re: iMac mostly dead. Opinions?
« Reply #6 on: October 29, 2013, 06:10:58 pm »

Thanks for all the advice. Looks like it was the drive.

I installed 10.6 on an external firewire drive, then used my Time Machine backup to restore my system to the external drive. It took awhile to get everything working, especially Lightroom and my Epson 3800. But it all seems to be working now, so I'm cloning to a brand new drive, which I will leave in an external box for a couple of weeks before attempting to install it myself.

Appreciate the thoughts.
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