Lappys died.....The darkside beckons which Mac

[RedRobin]

i use a quad core G5 at work fully specced up with 8 gig of ram and a tera bite hard drive and although its capable of doing a lot i think my 4 year old macbook is more than enough with its lowly 2gb ram and 80gb hard drive. its more than enough to run photoshop 4 and illustrator while browsing the web and listening to tunes. no point going over kill with a pro as its not cheap and the basic one is more than up to the job 

....That's exactly what I've got at home but my daughter's MacBook Pro 17" performs just as well. New big iMac for me........ When I stop spending on my car!

[cmdrfire]

Psh, here's something for you Macaholics. My mum's got an Intel dual-core iMac 4, like this:


It's suffered a hard disk drive failure.
Were it a normal computer, i.e., one not built by a money-hungry egomaniac with delusions of grandeur, I would be able to happily remove the hdd, put it in a caddy and connect it to my machine where I could assault the drive with a vast and bewildering array of tools to recover all the data. I could also buy a nice 1TB hdd and use that as a replacement.

Because it's not a normal computer, I can't do any of that; I either have to go through a nightmarish disassembly procedure (because, y'know, Apple don't really care about serviceability or longevity - "it's broken? just buy a new one!") or give it to Apple so some Mactard "genius" can tell me to buy a new one and then gleefully overcharge me for a repair. Which still won't have recovered the data off the hdd.

But hey. Think different, right?

[RedRobin]

^^^^
@ cmdrfire:

Tee-Hee! :snigger:

[animal]

cmdrfire: High-five! 

[cmdrfire]

cmdrfire: High-five! 

*virtual five!*

[mclovin]

Psh, here's something for you Macaholics. My mum's got an Intel dual-core iMac 4, like this:


It's suffered a hard disk drive failure.
Were it a normal computer, i.e., one not built by a money-hungry egomaniac with delusions of grandeur, I would be able to happily remove the hdd, put it in a caddy and connect it to my machine where I could assault the drive with a vast and bewildering array of tools to recover all the data. I could also buy a nice 1TB hdd and use that as a replacement.

Because it's not a normal computer, I can't do any of that; I either have to go through a nightmarish disassembly procedure (because, y'know, Apple don't really care about serviceability or longevity - "it's broken? just buy a new one!") or give it to Apple so some Mactard "genius" can tell me to buy a new one and then gleefully overcharge me for a repair. Which still won't have recovered the data off the hdd.

But hey. Think different, right?

Actually it's not that difficult...

http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/imacg5_17inch_HardDrive.pdf

The reason for the "tricky disassembly" is due to the packaging, the same is true for Dell and HP all-in-one machines, there is no other way to build these sort of units unfortunately, just think of it as a big laptop with a screen. They use standard 3.5" SATA drives by the way, so guess what? You can retrofit a nice 1TB drive after all, you just need to reinstall the OS from CD once you fit the new drive. Oh, and then you can put the old drive in a caddy and try to retrieve the data too. All pretty straightforward really.

I would also point out that I bet you haven't had to touch that Mac since your Mum bought it, admit it, if it was a PC you would have been over there to sort it out every couple of months (I speak from experience here, which is why my parents have an iMac).

 

[animal]

Psh, here's something for you Macaholics. My mum's got an Intel dual-core iMac 4, like this:


It's suffered a hard disk drive failure.
Were it a normal computer, i.e., one not built by a money-hungry egomaniac with delusions of grandeur, I would be able to happily remove the hdd, put it in a caddy and connect it to my machine where I could assault the drive with a vast and bewildering array of tools to recover all the data. I could also buy a nice 1TB hdd and use that as a replacement.

Because it's not a normal computer, I can't do any of that; I either have to go through a nightmarish disassembly procedure (because, y'know, Apple don't really care about serviceability or longevity - "it's broken? just buy a new one!") or give it to Apple so some Mactard "genius" can tell me to buy a new one and then gleefully overcharge me for a repair. Which still won't have recovered the data off the hdd.

But hey. Think different, right?

Actually it's not that difficult...

http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/imacg5_17inch_HardDrive.pdf

The reason for the "tricky disassembly" is due to the packaging, the same is true for Dell and HP all-in-one machines, there is no other way to build these sort of units unfortunately, just think of it as a big laptop with a screen. They use standard 3.5" SATA drives by the way, so guess what? You can retrofit a nice 1TB drive after all, you just need to reinstall the OS from CD once you fit the new drive. Oh, and then you can put the old drive in a caddy and try to retrieve the data too. All pretty straightforward really.

I would also point out that I bet you haven't had to touch that Mac since your Mum bought it, admit it, if it was a PC you would have been over there to sort it out every couple of months (I speak from experience here, which is why my parents have an iMac).

 

You will need some software like Mac Drive to access a Mac formatted drive on a PC though.

[cmdrfire]

Actually it's not that difficult...

http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/imacg5_17inch_HardDrive.pdf

The reason for the "tricky disassembly" is due to the packaging, the same is true for Dell and HP all-in-one machines, there is no other way to build these sort of units unfortunately, just think of it as a big laptop with a screen. They use standard 3.5" SATA drives by the way, so guess what? You can retrofit a nice 1TB drive after all, you just need to reinstall the OS from CD once you fit the new drive. Oh, and then you can put the old drive in a caddy and try to retrieve the data too. All pretty straightforward really.

I would also point out that I bet you haven't had to touch that Mac since your Mum bought it, admit it, if it was a PC you would have been over there to sort it out every couple of months (I speak from experience here, which is why my parents have an iMac).

 

It's still a damn nuisance, and I don't know how applicable that takedown guide is (that's for a G5, this is an Intel Mac which has a slightly different layout... should be similar though). Not got time to do that at the moment either (got exams this week  )

Also, I have had to keep fiddling with that Mac over the past couple of years of ownership because some applications (like iTunes) randomly hang; the well-renowned "Flash" problem means that Safari keeps dying; and it has trouble interfacing with the rest of the house network, so it doesn't like accessing our NAS via SMB which means that pulling media off the server is problematic at best.

animal's got a good point too, if it was a normal machine more likely than not I'd have formatted the drive in NTFS. As it is I'm going to have to do something or other to pull that data...

Still not quite as easy as you make out!

[mclovin]

Those early Intel iMacs have a pretty much identical layout to the G5 units, so that guide should work just fine for your Mum's iMac.

I have no idea why you are having problems with iTunes and Flash, what OS is it running? Snow Leopard only costs £25, so definitely worth upgrading if you haven't already as that should fix any issues like this. My Mac Mini is of a similar vintage and I have not had any of the problems you describe. As for communicating with the network in your house I fail to see why this is an issue, I can access my NAS from my Mac via SMB just as easily as I can via Windows or Linux??

A "normal" machine would not necessarily have drives formatted as NTFS, they might be FAT, or they might be EXT2 or EXT3 depending on the operating system (Windows or Linux). The only reason you need a bit of software for your PC to read the drive is because Windows does not ship with the ability to read multiple drive formats, only NTFS and FAT. So, you would have to do the same thing even if it was a standard Dell PC running Linux - In other words, this is not a Mac specific issue.

[mclovin]

PS - Whilst you have the iMac open it is a good opportunity to upgrade the RAM and, if you are feeling particularly adventurous you could upgrade the CPU as well. I did this with my Mac Mini (similar vintage to that iMac) a couple of years ago, it isn't that expensive to do and it makes a huge difference, particularly worth doing if the iMac is going to be running Snow Leopard.

[cmdrfire]

Those early Intel iMacs have a pretty much identical layout to the G5 units, so that guide should work just fine for your Mum's iMac.

I have no idea why you are having problems with iTunes and Flash, what OS is it running? Snow Leopard only costs £25, so definitely worth upgrading if you haven't already as that should fix any issues like this. My Mac Mini is of a similar vintage and I have not had any of the problems you describe. As for communicating with the network in your house I fail to see why this is an issue, I can access my NAS from my Mac via SMB just as easily as I can via Windows or Linux??

A "normal" machine would not necessarily have drives formatted as NTFS, they might be FAT, or they might be EXT2 or EXT3 depending on the operating system (Windows or Linux). The only reason you need a bit of software for your PC to read the drive is because Windows does not ship with the ability to read multiple drive formats, only NTFS and FAT. So, you would have to do the same thing even if it was a standard Dell PC running Linux - In other words, this is not a Mac specific issue.

Cheers for the guide. Doesn't stop it from being a nuisance. But a "normal" machine would be formatted as NTFS primarily because I would've built it and installed the OS myself
Think I will upgrade the RAM while I'm in there.

[mclovin]

Definitely install Snow Leopard on the new drive when you install it as well, it will probably sort out some of the niggles you mentioned earlier.

For the record, I'm no Mac evangelist, in fact I can't stand Mac evangelists and I have more PCs than Macs at home. However, I don't think changing a drive on an iMac is really that much of a big deal, personally I quite enjoyed the challenge of upgrading my Mac Mini!

[cmdrfire]

Definitely install Snow Leopard on the new drive when you install it as well, it will probably sort out some of the niggles you mentioned earlier.

For the record, I'm no Mac evangelist, in fact I can't stand Mac evangelists and I have more PCs than Macs at home. However, I don't think changing a drive on an iMac is really that much of a big deal, personally I quite enjoyed the challenge of upgrading my Mac Mini!

Sssh, I need something to argue with Robin about don't I?!

[mclovin]

Good point, well made.

 

[RedRobin]

Sssh, I need something to argue with Robin about don't I?!

....Stop being such a drama queen!