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buttongerald

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jan 29, 2016
341
629
St. John's, Newfoundland
Greetings all,

A friend gifted me a 27" iMac, from 2011, and right now I am just looking for some stability with it. When he gave it to me, he somehow managed to get Sonoma installed, but the hardware, given its age, was having a panic attack and it didn't work right. After MUCH fighting with a bunch of different USB sticks and various releases of MacOS and Mac OS X, I was finally able to bring it back down to Mountain Lion. I was then able to update it to Yosemite which is where it sits now.

The iMac is 27", 4GB of ram, and a 2.7Ghz Intel Core i5. The processor seems to be 1st or 2nd generation i5. She's well traveled that's for sure.

If I can correct the error I am asking about, I am going to upgrade the 4GB of ram to 16GB or 32GB. A SSD was already installed prior to me receiving it.

The issues I am having now are that:
1) Can't sign into iCloud or the App Store to download apps or updates
2) An error pertaining to one of the software's I really wanted to use on this machine

The software in question is OpenEmu, and it launches (using an older version) but gives an error I have never encountered before, and this error has been persistent across several versions of the operating system:

"Couldn't communicate with a helper application. Try your operation again. If that fails, quit and relaunch the application and try again."

I know this is probably software, but I am asking it in the hardware area because in all the years with my other Macs, I never encountered this, and I would roll back my last iMac constantly to Mavericks for a laugh to take in the nostalgia. I am determined to overcome it, as I have invested in a new keyboard and mouse specifically for this machine.

Does anyone know what could be causing this issue? Any help would be appreciated. Never before have I fought with a Mac and software to try to get something to run this hard. I was at it all last night.
 
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