My elder iMac has packed in

[Cowabunga]

It happened a while ago. There’s no apparent power, as if a fuse has blown. There’s nothing on the hard drive except the operating system and it was only used for the last three years as a second screen for my 27” machine. However I can’t give it away with my personal details, not sure what, on it and a password for booting it which the same as for my in-service machine. It was bought new in 2011.

After it being stored for the past year, the thought occurred that I miss it and it really is immaculate, if well used. So should I spend money on repairing a 13 year old computer? I’ve been on eBay and the average selling price for a similar machine in working order, the last with magnets holding the screen on for easy internal access, is only £50.

With that in mind there are severe doubts about the wisdom of getting it repaired although it breaks my heart contemplating smashing it up or removing the hard drive and smashing that and recycling it.
One alternative would be to buy a £50 to £80 machine in perfect order I suppose or a working rough cheaper one for parts. Little problems like this aren’t really worth wasting time with I know, but that’s just me. I like things working properly.

 

[GarMan]

Its sentimental, keep it until the missus or grandkids decide to do something about it someday when you wouldn't even remember it. Not worth keeping it as its of no much value or spend money on it.

The other option is to remove the HDD and advertise it on eBay as 'For parts' which may get enough beer money and you get the feel that it may be used by someone. You can try connecting the HDD to another computer in case it works to see if there's anything on it worth having a look at or else you can get it framed as a relic or just put a sledgehammer to it.

 

[Cowabunga]

Its sentimental, keep it until the missus or grandkids decide to do something about it someday when you wouldn't even remember it. Not worth keeping it as its of no much value or spend money on it.

The other option is to remove the HDD and advertise it on eBay as 'For parts' which may get enough beer money and you get the feel that it may be used by someone. You can try connecting the HDD to another computer in case it works to see if there's anything on it worth having a look at or else you can get it framed as a relic or just put a sledgehammer to it.

Truth be told it’s the missus that has forced my hand. She’s fed up with a useless ‘sculpure’ taking up the centre of the ‘best’ dining table in 'the recess’ of the sitting room. Personally my common sense says that it’s less work and less cost than a vase of flowers, but she’s having none of it.

 

[Pistonbroke]

Truth be told it’s the missus that has forced my hand. She’s fed up with a useless ‘sculpure’ taking up the centre of the ‘best’ dining table in 'the recess’ of the sitting room. Personally my common sense says that it’s less work and less cost than a vase of flowers, but she’s having none of it.

My neighbour is a Mac technician doing repairs and can upgrade older machines to the new operating system. HayTek on Facebook

 

[renewablejohn]

Mac PC in Manchester would soon sort it for you. They have specialised in Macs and keep my old dinosaurs running at very little cost. Recent teams meeting I had to abandon as they could not here what I was saying. They sorted with new microphone total repair cost only 40 quid which included the standard 25 quid they charge to diagnose whats wrong with the PC. Based in the heart of Manchester student community their always busy.

 

[Cowabunga]

My neighbour is a Mac technician doing repairs and can upgrade older machines to the new operating system. HayTek on Facebook

I was visiting Hay yesterday but didn’t follow up on your post until last night . My wife is going to be judging at the Royal Welsh and has been allocated a hotel in Hay, so we explored the route and hotel, as I will not be with her. What a coincidence and bad timing on my part.

 

[Pistonbroke]

I was visiting Hay yesterday but didn’t follow up on your post until last night . My wife is going to be judging at the Royal Welsh and has been allocated a hotel in Hay, so we explored the route and hotel, as I will not be with her. What a coincidence and bad timing on my part.

I'll pm you his details now

 

[deleted user 837354]

Worth getting a good techie shop to look at it, it might be salavagable. Whilst it is in bits have it cleaned out and then upgraded as far as possible. Older processors, SSDs and RAM are pretty stealing cheap unless you want the latest versions which run at gazillions of MhZ. I guess it's the power supply or something that is dead.

10-15 year old PCs are usually perfectly workable a Mac should be fine also.

 

[Tucker]

Interesting thread, we have an old one sat gathering dust that has hundreds of photos of the kids etc and we don't know how to get them off, we'll take it to someone eventually

 

[Cowabunga]

Worth getting a good techie shop to look at it, it might be salavagable. Whilst it is in bits have it cleaned out and then upgraded as far as possible. Older processors, SSDs and RAM are pretty stealing cheap unless you want the latest versions which run at gazillions of MhZ. I guess it's the power supply or something that is dead.

10-15 year old PCs are usually perfectly workable a Mac should be fine also.

I suspect the power supply as well. Yes, it’s perfectly workable and has a virtually empty 500GB hard drive and 12GB of RAM which made a massive difference to the 4GB it ran for many years. One wet day my dear wife will force my hand to either get it sorted or store it in the shed from whence it is unlikely to ever emerge again.

 

[Cowabunga]

Interesting thread, we have an old one sat gathering dust that has hundreds of photos of the kids etc and we don't know how to get them off, we'll take it to someone eventually

They should surely be stored on your iCloud account, so any Mac that you sign in, using your own name and password, should be able to retrieve everything. If you used TimeMachine to have a full plus incremental backups on an external hard drive, everything should be on that. It’s essential to use backup.

I’ve just had a new phone and everything on the old one, which amounted to some 50GB, was loaded from iCloud onto the new phone in a matter of less than 10 minutes [500mbps download speed]. I did the same when I bought my new iMac in 2020, but that took a lot longer. All my files and photos were installed on the new machine with zero issues. Even on my old machine, due to its limited storage capacity, all my Photo album was kept on another external hard drive.

We have been refurbishing the ground floor of the house recently and I had to move my current iMac to another room and carried it with both the TimeMachine and Photos hard drives, still attached, on the little step that is the stand. Of course the worse happened and the Photos drive with nearly 70,000 photos and videos fell onto the hard floor. Yes it was mortally injured and never revived. Got a new 4TB hard drive from Amazon next day and downloaded the Photos album directly onto the new drive which I’ve given a new name, just to avoid confusion. It took a while for nearly a Terabyte to download but I left it to it and it was a painless experience. Apart from the pain of about £100 for the new drive of course.

As an aside, all my photos are available on all my devices even though all but the iMac have far less storage than is the size of the Photos album. That is made possible because only low resolution thumbnails are stored on all devices except the iMac and iCloud. [the Photos album is actually on an external drive to save space anyway] I actually have to pay for 2 Terabytes of iCloud storage and currently use just a bit more than half. The current iMac has 2TB internal SSD storage and two external 4TB hard drives attached with an occasional use of portable external 2TB hard drive and 1TB NVME drive in an enclosure.

 

[Exfarmer]

Just came across this , the older Imacs are completely repairable, just need the right tools. It was the later ones about 2018 on where you cannot remove the screen unless you are very lucky as I found to my cost

 

[PSQ]

If it’s the same as my 2010 iMac then there is a known issue with the driver for the LED backlight for the screen, where the screen either doesn’t light up or it goes black after a few minutes. On mine I set the backlight to minimum, and it lasts a lot longer, but when it goes black the telltale that it’s the LED’s is that you can shine a bright torch at the screen and just make out what’s on the screen.
Or it might be something completely different…