I have a 20″ iMac 5,1 it’s the late 2006 model with 2.16ghz core 2 duo processor that I’ve upgraded and tweaked and fangled as much as I could to get my money’s worth out of it. Back in 2007 I bought the computer with the intention of switching all the computers in my house to apple. Since I’m cheap I opted for a refurbished iMac and waited for the plain cardboard box that it came in to arrive in the mail. Once the machine arrived it started to kernel panic over and over, I called Apple and they told me to take it to an apple store at which time they replaced the main board. A two years later I had a problem with the harddrive which started clicking and finally failed, luckily I had a Time Machine backup which saved me. Apple replaced the hard drive under my AppleCare warranty. After that I upgraded the ram in the machine to 2gb, which later found out I could upgrade to 3gb. Just a few months ago I replaced the internal hard drive with a 1TB model to store my multimedia files. As you can see this machine has quite a bit of mileage and has served me well but I’d like to squeeze a bit more life out of it. You see earlier this year we bought my wife Jen a MacBook Pro since the kids are using the Mac Mini more and more. They fill the thing with iOS apps, music and iOS backups and fighting over occupying it 90% of the time. Since we just got Jen a new Mac I want to hold off on getting myself one for a bit and see if I can use this one until the wheels fall off, so here is my plan to extend its life for another year:
- Replace one of the 1 gb sticks currently in there to a 2gb so I end up with 3gb or ram
- Purchase an optical drive bay replacement to house a SATA drive
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=842548
http://newmodeus.com/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=2_27&products_id=260
http://newmodeus.com/pics/caddy/why-newmodeus.html - Purchase a SSD drive to put in the optical drive slot replacing the SuperDrive. Who uses CDs and DVDs any more?
http://macsales.com (any suggestions as to which one I should go with?) - Later buy an enclosure for the SuperDrive for those times where I may end up needing one.
- Install OS X Lion on the SSD and set it to the boot drive.
My goal is to speed the machine up as much as I can, by housing the OS and applications from this SSD drive and use the normal internal drive for file storage and such, the extra gig of ram will help some too. Luckily this machine is a 2.16ghz core 2 duo so that helps.
What are your thoughts on this? For just under $200 I’m extending the life of this poor machine I should have “flipped” a few years ago.
