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.