Alright, before the laughing starts and everyone tells me to get a new mac…… Let me first tell everyone I have multiple new mac's in the house. With 4 teenage daughters we also have multiple iPhones, iPads, iPods, apple tv's, as well as a time capsule & express. We are an Apple house and this is purely an attempt to keep the old iMac going and get as much life out of it as I can. It may be a novelty, but using it reminds me of when my kids were all under 5 years old. What a great time that was and Dad was King!
So a little background: We bought this iMac new in late 2006 and wow has time flown. However, a couple years ago after getting a new MacBook Pro and MacBook Air in the house no one wanted to use this old girl since laptops are way more fun since there mobile. Since this old iMac was still running great but no one was willing to use it, I did the following updates: added 2gb of ram, installed a 500gb Samsung 840 SSD, a bluetooth dongle, and bumped the osx to 10.7.5, upgraded to iLife 11, plugged into ethernet to get internet speed up (came with g wireless), and it's still using Microsoft office 2008 (family pack) without issue.
What I would still like to do is the following:
1) bump ram over 2gb to the 3gb (4gb installed) which other similar vintage iMacs can use,
2) install an upgraded CPU T7600 preferred (m-socketed),
3) add N or AC wireless vs the factory G,
4) expand the number of USB ports available (only 3 currently and seen options on Amazon),
5) maybe upgrade to a (10.7.5 osx) compatible iWork for Pages, Numbers and Keynote. (not really sure if it's really needed with the Office package)
6) add any "Highly Suggested (10.7.5 osx) Compatible Apps" from the app store before its too late!
Ultimately I am trying to use this old iMac like a "home server" or in other words the main computer to store in one place the families photos, music, movies, etc.
As she sits now her speed is not too shabby, 20 seconds for start up compared to 90-110 second before. Applications start quick as well as downloading and uploading data. The main issue I have is the amount of time it takes for the internet pages to load, its noticeably slower on either Chrome or Safari, and I haven't tried any others. I just ran a speed-test by Ookla and had a Download speed of 50Mbps and an upload speed of 4.31 Mbps.
So a little background: We bought this iMac new in late 2006 and wow has time flown. However, a couple years ago after getting a new MacBook Pro and MacBook Air in the house no one wanted to use this old girl since laptops are way more fun since there mobile. Since this old iMac was still running great but no one was willing to use it, I did the following updates: added 2gb of ram, installed a 500gb Samsung 840 SSD, a bluetooth dongle, and bumped the osx to 10.7.5, upgraded to iLife 11, plugged into ethernet to get internet speed up (came with g wireless), and it's still using Microsoft office 2008 (family pack) without issue.
What I would still like to do is the following:
1) bump ram over 2gb to the 3gb (4gb installed) which other similar vintage iMacs can use,
2) install an upgraded CPU T7600 preferred (m-socketed),
3) add N or AC wireless vs the factory G,
4) expand the number of USB ports available (only 3 currently and seen options on Amazon),
5) maybe upgrade to a (10.7.5 osx) compatible iWork for Pages, Numbers and Keynote. (not really sure if it's really needed with the Office package)
6) add any "Highly Suggested (10.7.5 osx) Compatible Apps" from the app store before its too late!
Ultimately I am trying to use this old iMac like a "home server" or in other words the main computer to store in one place the families photos, music, movies, etc.
As she sits now her speed is not too shabby, 20 seconds for start up compared to 90-110 second before. Applications start quick as well as downloading and uploading data. The main issue I have is the amount of time it takes for the internet pages to load, its noticeably slower on either Chrome or Safari, and I haven't tried any others. I just ran a speed-test by Ookla and had a Download speed of 50Mbps and an upload speed of 4.31 Mbps.
