Computer Graveyard

I’m tak­ing my old iMac in tomor­row for one last time. That is, I’m drop­ping it off at FedEx to have shipped off to the recy­cling cen­ter. That was my first Mac and it served me well. I had it upgrad­ed a cou­ple of times (remem­ber when you could do that to a Mac?) and even had to use Apple­Care once to replace the video board. That com­bined with a cou­ple of fam­i­ly moves, and I’ve kept the orig­i­nal box around all these years so I could box it up and take it some place. See, as much as I love the design of the Intel iMacs, they’re pret­ty awk­ward to lug around (at least the 24″ mod­el I have — I know, sad sto­ry). I even put the orig­i­nal foam cov­er back over it from the first unbox­ing.

iMac re-boxed

I had the orig­i­nal dri­ve replaced with the first 1TB dri­ves on the mar­ket: the Hitachi Deskstar. Between that and the 8GB of RAM and giant screen, this thing felt lux­u­ri­ous… for about three years or so. After the last OS upgrade or so, it got real­ly slow to use. Then final­ly, that Hitachi dri­ve gave out. I had an exter­nal clone of the dri­ve I could boot from and run, but that seemed even slow­er. So I ulti­mate­ly decid­ed to get a lap­top (by then Angela was on her third Mac laptop).

Back in 2007, the idea of stuff­ing 1,000,000,000 bytes into a dri­ve was pret­ty new

So it end­ed up sit­ting on the floor of my office for sev­er­al years. I had meant to swap out the dri­ve and restore it, but hon­est­ly it would­n’t even real­ly run the games my kids want to play (Minecraft rec­om­mends OS 10.12, which this machine could­n’t come close to run­ning). So, the com­put­er I got before my daugh­ter was even born is now head­ed out the door. I’ve recy­cled many, many com­put­ers over the years. In fact, Angela does­n’t have any of those three Mac lap­tops any­more, even (she’s gone full iPad). But this machine is the one I’ve had the hard­est time get­ting rid of. 

As Marie Kon­do would have me do, it’s time to thank it for its ser­vice and send it on its way. So I final­ly got around to crack­ing open the case. Since I can’t boot off the dri­ve, it’s not very easy to for­mat it (and remov­ing it is eas­i­er than run­ning DBAN for hours and hours). If you work on Macs, then you have to have a Torx dri­ver set. I’d aug­ment that to say you should have a mag­net­ic Torx dri­ver set, as I had to pull and replace the eight screws around the mon­i­tor with tweez­ers. It end­ed up not being such a ter­ri­ble task as I’d feared all this time, but I could­n’t guar­an­tee that the screen still works, either. 

Hard dri­ve pulled out of the iMac. That’s the screen in the top-left cor­ner, turned backwards
A less fun ver­sion of Oper­a­tion with eight Torx screws

By Jason Coleman

Structural engineer and technical content manager Bentley Systems by day. Geeky father and husband all the rest of time.

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *