I have an early iMac 24" (early 2009) and upgraded the original 2GB RAM to 4GB, which was the max this model would take. Purchased from Crucial, using their software to advise what I needed.
This worked well for some years, but late in 2016 I notice that it was a bit slow at times. Now in my days of using a PC, I would do a clean install every six months or so and that kept everything up to speed, so the obvious solution was to try the same for the iMac. It took half a day or so and there was an improvement, but not as much as I had hoped. It still took nearly three minutes to load the operating system and around the same time to load photoshop. Time to consider the latest iMac, but for various reasons, I would prefer to wait for 12 months, so would a new hard drive keep me going?
On to the Crucial website and using their software I could go for a replacement Hard drive, or one of the new Solid State Drives. Bit of research later and the SSD could deliver some significant improvements if the drive was indeed the problem. This was a bit of a gamble and not cheap at £300 for a 1TB SSD and an adapter for the iMac drive slot.
More research found some u tube videos showing how to change the hard drive to an SSD and I decided to bite the bullet. After all, if it failed the SSD could be used as an external drive, so it wouldn't be wasted. I won't bore you with the scary bits of removing the front glass and the screen and disconnecting lots of cables to get at the drive slot and I needed to change my underwear a couple of times before it was all back together, so now the moment of truth ................. do I still have a working iMac or not?
Set up a stopwatch and pressed the on switch: 37 seconds to initiate operating system.
Same stopwatch and clicked on Photoshop: 7 seconds to fully open. Even better, where I had a photo with a number of layers open, new operations in Photoshop would have the timer chugging away to complete the operation and now it is instant .......... no timer.
I'm not sure whether this was down to solid research, luck, or a fair sprinkling of both, but I now have an iMac that is working better than new and I don't have any worries about waiting until next year to get the latest iMac.
This worked well for some years, but late in 2016 I notice that it was a bit slow at times. Now in my days of using a PC, I would do a clean install every six months or so and that kept everything up to speed, so the obvious solution was to try the same for the iMac. It took half a day or so and there was an improvement, but not as much as I had hoped. It still took nearly three minutes to load the operating system and around the same time to load photoshop. Time to consider the latest iMac, but for various reasons, I would prefer to wait for 12 months, so would a new hard drive keep me going?
On to the Crucial website and using their software I could go for a replacement Hard drive, or one of the new Solid State Drives. Bit of research later and the SSD could deliver some significant improvements if the drive was indeed the problem. This was a bit of a gamble and not cheap at £300 for a 1TB SSD and an adapter for the iMac drive slot.
More research found some u tube videos showing how to change the hard drive to an SSD and I decided to bite the bullet. After all, if it failed the SSD could be used as an external drive, so it wouldn't be wasted. I won't bore you with the scary bits of removing the front glass and the screen and disconnecting lots of cables to get at the drive slot and I needed to change my underwear a couple of times before it was all back together, so now the moment of truth ................. do I still have a working iMac or not?
Set up a stopwatch and pressed the on switch: 37 seconds to initiate operating system.
Same stopwatch and clicked on Photoshop: 7 seconds to fully open. Even better, where I had a photo with a number of layers open, new operations in Photoshop would have the timer chugging away to complete the operation and now it is instant .......... no timer.
I'm not sure whether this was down to solid research, luck, or a fair sprinkling of both, but I now have an iMac that is working better than new and I don't have any worries about waiting until next year to get the latest iMac.
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