Saturday, December 10th, 2005

On the death of an iMac

It appears my iMac is dead. It was getting a bit long in the tooth, I bought it in February of 2003 as a refurbished unit from Small Dog Electronics and it’s seen a lot of use since then, mainly as a web testing machine and iTunes jukebox. In any case it’s almost always turned on and doing something.

It locked up on me yesterday, it’s been doing that a lot recently. I let it sit for a while and the screen goes to black and I come back later and it won’t wake back up. I usually just turn it off and back on and all is well. Yesterday I did that and it kernel panicked.

I can’t even get the thing to boot off of a CD, making me think it’s a mainboard issue and not a RAM issue. I may try to get it fixed, or at least diagnosed to see if it’s worth it to even try. I found two Apple repair places in Columbia. One, MXN, is way overpriced for what I need. The second, MMCS will give me an estimate for $30. So we’ll probably be taking the iMac to them next week.

In the meantime, I manged to get my iTunes library moved over to the Dell. I tried copying straight from the iPod to the Dell using Xplay, but that didn’t work as planned. So I used MacDrive instead and copied my library over from my iMac backup drive. I lost maybe twenty songs that way, but at least my music is still usable.

Unfortunately, XPlay made my iPod go nuts and stop working. So I reformatted the iPod for Windows and tried to sync it back with the Dell. iTunes has hung up my computer every time I’ve tried this so far. So I uninstalled iTunes and Quicktime, installed Quicktime, upgraded it to Quicktime Pro and then re-downloaded and installed iTunes. Now I’m charging the iPod in the dock via the firewire port. I’m hoping that a fully charged iPod will behave better. I can hope right?

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 10th, 2005 at 11:51 am and is filed under Information Technology and Thoughts on Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

---

4 Responses to “On the death of an iMac”

1. erika Says:
   December 10th, 2005 at 1:47 pm

   Did you by any chance try this sequence on your Mac?–

   1. Hold Power button for 10 seconds or until computer shuts off
   2. Hold Shift+Control+Option+Power button together for 5 seconds
   3. The press Power button alone.

   ?

2. Library Monk Says:
   December 10th, 2005 at 2:12 pm

   Just tried that, still a kernel panic screen.

3. Eileen Says:
   December 13th, 2005 at 9:50 am

   oooh, i remember those days. *grumble!*

4. Library Monk - the blog of Dan Greene » The iMac lives Says:
   December 24th, 2005 at 10:15 pm

   [...] Well, earlier this month I reported that my iMac was dead. Well it’s alive again. Turns out that it wasn’t dead after all. Joe at MMCS had it for a week and it ran rock solid. He defragged the drive and fixed a few disk permissions but he didn’t find anything would cause a kernel panic. [...]

---

---