Tag Archives: osx

Maybe Get Some Coffee

I got this message when I was rebuilding my father-in-law’s 2007 iMac. It happened at one point when I was trying to install on OS on the boot drive.

This might be the most realistic time-to-complete estimate I’ve ever seen in an Apple installer:

(I haven’t talked about that computer. I got it a couple of years ago and I’ve been meaning to upgrade it, just like I did with our own 2007 iMac. The only difference from that upgrade plan was I only used a 1 TB drive for the boot drive. The use case is to back up some computers at work, so I added a 4 TB external drive. I would have prefered making it internal, so I could use the SATA connection rather than a USB 2.0 external drive. But … sigh. Apple. There isn’t really room for another drive (yes, I know about replacing the Superdrive with in internal drive) but beyond that, getting at the drive, in case it fails and needs replacing is so incredibly hard, that I decided I could live with slow backups.)

iMac Salvaged!

Mostly I’ve been blogging about my adventures in Linux-land. But I wanted to write a bit about my other project. About 9 1/2 years ago, we got an iMac, and about four years ago we replaced it with a Mac Mini.

The iMac was a mid-2007 20″ model. (This was the first Aluminum and Glass version, replacing the earlier white plastic models. You can watch Steve Jobs introduce the Aluminum Series on YouTube.)  The specs were: 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo, 250 GB SATA, SuperDrive, and 1 GB of DDR2. It cost $1,220. The late 2012 Mac Mini that replaced it had a 2.5GHz Core i5, 500 MB SATA/5400, 8 GB DDR3) and cost $669, but we had to buy a monitor for it (a Samsung S23C570, which probably cost around $200). So the Mac Mini was definitely an upgrade.

But that wasn’t why we upgraded. It was because the iMac was barely working. The hard drive would go “tick tick tick” for the first hour or two whenever you started running it. The SuperDrive had quit working a couple of years earlier. (Technically, a DVD got stuck in it and could not be removed.) Plus the usual “I’m an old Mac so sometimes I just take forever to do things” that we’re all used to. We finally upgraded because we couldn’t trust that it would work any more.

So. Fast forward four years. I got tired of tripping over the iMac, but I couldn’t bear the thought of losing such a pretty computer. So …I fixed it. Or maybe I threw good money after bad and wasted my time fixing a ten-year old computer. Or both.

I watched a ton of how-to videos (this one was particularly helpful) and read the instructions over and over again. Oh, and before I did that, I got a set of tools from iFixit and parts from OWC (MacSales). Then, after putting it off all during Lent, I ran out of excuses after Easter. So I spent last Friday replacing the original 250 GB hard drive with a 2 GB drive and the SuperDrive with a 2.5″ 1 GB drive. Here’s what it looks like on the inside with the new drives.

iMac 20" (2007 model)

See more pictures of the work in progress on Flickr.

I will say that Apple sure doesn’t want you to make a bootable OS install disk. In spite of all the instructions they provide (here, here, and here). I own three Macs, but ((Shift+) Option+) Command+R doesn’t work on any of them. I finally dug up an old Snow Leopard install DVD and then upgraded to El Cap the slow and painful way.

VLC vs. DVD Player.app

Apple’s DVD Player.app has been broken for so long, I honestly can’t remember the last time I was pleased with it.

It’s very telling that if you go to Apple’s web site, you can’t find DVD Player there. If I was them, I’d be ashamed of it too. I wouldn’t be surprised if Windows Media Player worked better.

Since (at least) Snow Leopard version 10.6.4, and continuing now in 10.6.5, DVD Player has been impossible. Routinely it crashes before you get to the main disc menu, and I’ve probably sent in 20 crash reports.

But no more. I switched to VLC. And you know what? “It just worked.” It’s a shame Apple can’t make software like that any more.