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How many people's 24" iMac is still running strong?
- Thread starter Tutone
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My Mom is using my 2008 iMac and it is working fine. I was thinking about retiring it and handing down my 2011 iMac to her. But since I switched to a SSD Thunderbolt boot drive, I see no need to upgrade my 2011. I am fairly regularly backing up her 2008 because I fear the fatal day of the hard drive crashing. But so far so good. I might try to make it through the end of the year. But since it no longer gets OS updates and some programs don't run on the old OS, it is on borrowed time.
I have a Imac Intel 24" core 2 duo A1225 which was thrown out by someone next door. At first I thought it was just a monitor, but as I got closer it was a All in One. I took it home like a stray cat, I figured let me plug it in, it looked like it was in pretty good shape, no cracks on the screen, aluminum case had no dents or major scratches. Anyways, after I plugged it in, nothing, no sound, so screen, nothing! So, now it's time to do some research. After awhile on google and youtube, I figured it was probably the power supply, so I went online to ebay and bought one. Now, it could always be the logic board or something else, but I checked for burns on the logic board and it looked good to me. Still I was taking a chance. I found out that the Imac's are not that hard to take apart. When I opened it, it was very dirty and dusty, all three fans needed to be cleaned, took out the power supply and also replaced the power a/c d/c sata cable which had a broken sensor wire on it. I'm glad I did that because it gave me a chance to really clean up this bad boy. Once I got the power supply, I had to replace the hard drive, I had a few sata 500gig seagate's laying around from other projects. I replaced that, I had a set of OS X 10.5 disc,so I loaded it up, Oh yes, it worked! It had 4 gig of ram and the optical drive was intact. Speakers were good, wi-fi, blue-tooth all working. I decided to upgrade the OS so I ordered the Snow Leopard 10.6.3 from Apple online and then upgraded online to 10.6.8 and finally upgraded to El Capitan which didn't take that long to install, under 1 hour, not bad. I am using a HP USB keyboard and wireless HP mouse which work great. So, there you have it. The next day I saw an empty box of a HP Tower where the Imac was, guess they decided to go back to Windows, oh well. The only thing that bothers me is the power supply generates a lot of heat. I read that these models did have issues with overheating, The CPU fan starts to work overtime when it gets really hot. I'm thinking of buying an external fan to keep it extra cool, don't want anything melting on me. I'm glad I did the overhaul, it's amazing how these things really last, the only thing that had to be replaced was the power supply and that probably fried the hard drive, everything else remains intact, oh, by the way, camera and microphone work great too. Thanks for reading.
Whats the temperature of the power supply under load and what's the ambient temp? My power supply is maxing (Under heavy load) at 70 C with ambient temp around 25 C after I cleaned mine really well. The problem is not so much the fan as it is the air passage above the fan (where aluminum radiators are, right above the fan and up) which goes from the fan, passes the cpu, the power supply and then exits at the very top. Clean that passage .. Blow some compressed air and vacuum clean at the other side at the same moment. My power supply was reaching 85-89 C after 2 years of no cleaning. Now, like I already mentioned, it's 70 c max.
Oh, and btw, my power supply has a chip (right in the center of the power supply) which appeared to me to be slightly shiny. I touched it and my finger had a little black powder on it. I'm kinda afraid it was, in fact, melting. But it seems safe now.
Baypharm - sorry for the delayed response.
The drive removed from the 24" iMac was a Hitachi 3.5" drive, 640 GB. The label indicates Apr 2009.
I'm running 75 C on my 2007 iMac 24" Core 2 Duo "Extreme" (2.8Ghz / 4GB / 1TB WD Blue HDD). Also around 25 C in here at this moment. It's been running for 2hrs but not under a heavy load at all. Activity Monitor settles-out at 4% (2.5% User + 1.5% System) running Safari / Mail / Messages / Tweetbot plus the zillion background tasks El Capitan brings with it. My fans rarely go above idle.
I use this nearly-decade-old iMac daily and it still rocks whatever I need it to do, but geez I want to pop an SSD in!
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Hello,
been some time since my last post here.
Yesterday i replaced the HDD with a 1 Tb Samsung SSD, speeding up read/write and startup times a lot!
On the same occasion i changed the PRAM battery with a new one, dusted off the inside, cleaned the IPS panel, and checked all the screws and connectors.
Now it's like brand new!
My 24" iMac is a late 2009 model (3.06 processor, ATI hd 4850, 8 Gb ram).
been some time since my last post here.
Yesterday i replaced the HDD with a 1 Tb Samsung SSD, speeding up read/write and startup times a lot!
On the same occasion i changed the PRAM battery with a new one, dusted off the inside, cleaned the IPS panel, and checked all the screws and connectors.
Now it's like brand new!
My 24" iMac is a late 2009 model (3.06 processor, ATI hd 4850, 8 Gb ram).
Wanted to restart this discussion for the Early Intel board, so had the thread moved here. Anyone here still running a 24"? What specs and how's it handling what you're throwing at it?
I have a 2007 24" that I've nursed along for a while, but it's developed some screen and fan issues so I may look into opening it up to clean out the dust (I believe this is the reason for both of them, it does run wicked hot). Running Mountain Lion and El Cap on an SSD and 6GB RAM ought to be plenty fast.
I have a 2007 24" that I've nursed along for a while, but it's developed some screen and fan issues so I may look into opening it up to clean out the dust (I believe this is the reason for both of them, it does run wicked hot). Running Mountain Lion and El Cap on an SSD and 6GB RAM ought to be plenty fast.
Great to get threads like this moved over here!
Last year I got two 24" early-2009 (the one with the black backside) for the Office. Came at 100€ each. One even sported an SSD, the other one will get one soon.
A first they ran patched Mojave for an RDP-Connection to Win2008-Office-Server.
Now, because I have to upgrade the Office network to a full-Win10Pro setting I'm pretty amazed, that these old guys are capable of running Win10Pro x64 quite decently (though sound-experience is much worse compared to OSX/macOS).
Screen has a slightly "yellow" touch, but only noticable, when side-by-side to another Mac.
It's a shame, Apple doesn't support the early intel machines anymore, while clever people like @dosdude1 still can make that happen. Even Microsoft seems to be more kind to these older machines, while, at the same time, they were abandoned by their own manufacturer ...
Predesessors of these first aluminum-iMacs were late white acrylic-iMacs. Got them in 2015/16 and they do/did a good job as RDP-Clients and overall, though officially limited to Lion. Unfortunately two white 24" iMacs died last year (GPU or capacitors? I didn't have the time to open them yet). I'm really fond of their bright matte display and the sound - looking foreward to restore them ...
Last year I got two 24" early-2009 (the one with the black backside) for the Office. Came at 100€ each. One even sported an SSD, the other one will get one soon.
A first they ran patched Mojave for an RDP-Connection to Win2008-Office-Server.
Now, because I have to upgrade the Office network to a full-Win10Pro setting I'm pretty amazed, that these old guys are capable of running Win10Pro x64 quite decently (though sound-experience is much worse compared to OSX/macOS).
Screen has a slightly "yellow" touch, but only noticable, when side-by-side to another Mac.
It's a shame, Apple doesn't support the early intel machines anymore, while clever people like @dosdude1 still can make that happen. Even Microsoft seems to be more kind to these older machines, while, at the same time, they were abandoned by their own manufacturer ...
Predesessors of these first aluminum-iMacs were late white acrylic-iMacs. Got them in 2015/16 and they do/did a good job as RDP-Clients and overall, though officially limited to Lion. Unfortunately two white 24" iMacs died last year (GPU or capacitors? I didn't have the time to open them yet). I'm really fond of their bright matte display and the sound - looking foreward to restore them ...
White 24"s are infamous for GPU problems, especially ones with the 7300GT. 7600GT seems to last better but also problematic. On the aluminum ones the 8800GS seems to be problematic as well, even going through this thread a few people mentioned getting their GPUs replaced due to that one. Nvidia dedicated GPUs in Macs were really problematic in the late 2000s apparently...
Mine is also running like a champ. Currently my daughter is using the 2007 iMac in her room for light use.
I have a pair of early 2008 iMacs in my classroom that I use daily. One's a 20" 2.4, the other is a 24" 2.8. Both of these machines are running patched Mojave. The 24" sits on a table by the door of my classroom running PowerPoint, showing classroom announcements, different schedules, or my seating chart. It's on 8 hours a day five days a week, and it's been a fantastic little machine!
It's kitted with a tiny 64GB SSD because that's what I found in a drawer when I was putting it together, and because all it needs room for is Mojave, Office, and the contents of my OneDrive. I remote into it from other machines in the room to remote control it. The kiddos are always impressed to see me working it from my desk. Or they're confused because it does things on its own
Like others have noted about theirs, it does have a bit of a yellow tinge to the screen these days, though it's not something you'd notice unless it's next to another machine. And given that it never is, no problem!
It's kitted with a tiny 64GB SSD because that's what I found in a drawer when I was putting it together, and because all it needs room for is Mojave, Office, and the contents of my OneDrive. I remote into it from other machines in the room to remote control it. The kiddos are always impressed to see me working it from my desk. Or they're confused because it does things on its own
Like others have noted about theirs, it does have a bit of a yellow tinge to the screen these days, though it's not something you'd notice unless it's next to another machine. And given that it never is, no problem!
I bought an early 2009 24" iMac in January. Specs: 2.93GHz, 8GB ram, 640 GB hdd, 256MB GeForce GT 120.
Still testing various operating systems. Currently there are three partitions running Snow Leopard, El Capitan and High Sierra. High Sierra seems to run a little laggy. Should I swap the hdd for an ssd?
Snow Leopard and El Capitan run great. I use Pages, LibreOffice, Photos, Itunes, Firefox, Spotify, Telegram and some old games. I also installed the Steam app trying to play Team Fortress 2. It downloads and starts just fine, but boy this is not quite the experience i hoped for. It's like back in the nineties when waiting for the next level to load left you with enough time to leave for the supermarket, buy a new soda and be back on your seat just when it's ready to move on.
Still testing various operating systems. Currently there are three partitions running Snow Leopard, El Capitan and High Sierra. High Sierra seems to run a little laggy. Should I swap the hdd for an ssd?
Snow Leopard and El Capitan run great. I use Pages, LibreOffice, Photos, Itunes, Firefox, Spotify, Telegram and some old games. I also installed the Steam app trying to play Team Fortress 2. It downloads and starts just fine, but boy this is not quite the experience i hoped for. It's like back in the nineties when waiting for the next level to load left you with enough time to leave for the supermarket, buy a new soda and be back on your seat just when it's ready to move on.
An SSD will do wonders for your performance on that machine. Bootup, app start, loading files all much faster and it really does help with OSes newer than Lion. Snow Leopard will be stupidly fast with an SSD as well. Highly recommend it. You can remove the optical drive and put a hard drive/SSD in there if you want to keep your 640GB as a data drive or get another drive to put there as well, there's some guides for that online.
GT 120 wasn't the best card for gaming, but it's the most common one you'll find online with these guys now (other than the base 9400m which sucks). GT 130 and especially the ATI Radeon 4850 are much better for games, but they're hard to track down and some suffer from graphical glitches. I ran TF2 when it was new pretty well on my 2007 24" but the Mac port cuts my FPS down quite a bit, still playable with tweaked settings but it stutters a lot.
Since I'm in urge to "find" Win10pro-workstations for a forced office-network upgrade, I am pleased, that the late-2008/early-2009 24" iMacs are quite decent machines to work with (especially when upgraded with an SSD and 8GB RAM).
To be fair, MS does a good job with Win10pro after that horrible Win8 debacle and within Win10 nearly all the basics functions, I depend on when working on macOS, are present too.
It's like "Hell freezes over" now the other way round ... (especially because Apple is badly abandoning their heritage Macs).
To be fair, MS does a good job with Win10pro after that horrible Win8 debacle and within Win10 nearly all the basics functions, I depend on when working on macOS, are present too.
It's like "Hell freezes over" now the other way round ... (especially because Apple is badly abandoning their heritage Macs).
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Bought 2 iMac 8,1 2.8GHz C2Ds new in 2008. One has been powered on 24/7 since then and still runs like it did out of the box. Use it for working on older files using Adobe CS5.5, administration and running as a second workstation alongside my primary 27" iMac. My other half uses the other one for basic design work. They're bulletproof!
I'm planning on buying a 24" for my collection. Do you guys have any suggestions on which model to choose?
I thought about a 2009 model because of DDR3 support, but I'm not sure what GPU to look for. I don't need the most capable GPU, but it should be reliable.
I thought about a 2009 model because of DDR3 support, but I'm not sure what GPU to look for. I don't need the most capable GPU, but it should be reliable.
Avoid the 8800GS at all costs for the 2008 model. The 2600 Pro in the 2007/2008 seems to be pretty reliable and handles games/programs from the era quite acceptable. 9400m is pretty reliable but not the best choice performance wise, easily the worst. The GPU upgrades on the 2009 models I can't speak with certainty on, I know that the Radeon 4850 fails on these, there was a major freezing problem with them. This failure was also present in 2009 27" models with the same card. GT 120 I have heard some failures on, but I'm forgetting specifics. GT 130 I do not know, never heard of any issues with it.
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Hmm, so i will go for a 9400 then. I always liked them and maybe the only Nvidia GPU that was reliable after the intel transition.
I had one - I would have given it to you in the name of posterity. I got rid of it a few years ago.