Bought a late 2006 iMac...With graphics issues

[LOLZpersonok]

Today I bought a late 2006 iMac, 20" for $200. I have a feeling that it has bad graphics because there are occasional artifacts on the screen (horizontal lines) that can be covered up with other applications as they don't sit overtop everything. They aren't huge and go away if I close the application but I fear things may get much worse. Is there any way I can remedy this?

 

[cirus]

Today I bought a late 2006 iMac, 20" for $200. I have a feeling that it has bad graphics because there are occasional artifacts on the screen (horizontal lines) that can be covered up with other applications as they don't sit overtop everything. They aren't huge and go away if I close the application but I fear things may get much worse. Is there any way I can remedy this?

Not buy a 7 year old computer?

Contact the seller.

 

[Zerotolerance]

It would cost more to fix it than the iMac is worth. I'm assuming you bought it sight-unseen, or else you would have seen the problem before buying. If you bought it on eBay or some other site "as is" you're out of luck, but if the seller made any claims that it was in good working condition, you should try to get your money back.

 

[LOLZpersonok]

It would cost more to fix it than the iMac is worth. I'm assuming you bought it sight-unseen, or else you would have seen the problem before buying. If you bought it on eBay or some other site "as is" you're out of luck, but if the seller made any claims that it was in good working condition, you should try to get your money back.

I bought it over Kijiji so it wasn't shipped. I saw it when it was running and we saw not a single issue.

Now that I have it, when I first started it when I got home, I saw several artifacts. When I came home from work, I started it, ran it for about 5-6 hours and didn't see a single artifact. It ran absolutely flawless. I have the fans constantly ramped all the way up and once I clean it out it will probably stay even cooler.

Apparently issues begin to arise when significant amount of heat is generated.

I have it running right now and so far everything is fine. I even ran iMovie '09 for a little bit and nothing happened.

 

[Zerotolerance]

I used that same exact iMac, the late '06 20" model, every day up until two weeks ago when I bought the new late 2013 model. I still have it, and it still works flawlessly running Lion. As I recall, the 17" iMac from '06 had some notorious graphics issues with vertical lines appearing on the screen, but the 20" and 24" models had no known hardware issues to speak of.

 

[LOLZpersonok]

I used that same exact iMac, the late '06 20" model, every day up until two weeks ago when I bought the new late 2013 model. I still have it, and it still works flawlessly running Lion. As I recall, the 17" iMac from '06 had some notorious graphics issues with vertical lines appearing on the screen, but the 20" and 24" models had no known hardware issues to speak of.

I sure hope you're right. This machine runs flawlessly (it still needs to be cleaned out a bit, software and hardware) and it looks very clean. It's in great condition and I'd hate to see that I wasted $200 on something that would die on me. Again, I'm using the machine right now and I'm not seeing any artifacts.

 

[LOLZpersonok]

I've been putting a lot of load on this system. The temperature reading on the smcFanControl that's closest to the graphics processor never reaches more than 36 degrees Celsius. I also have not seen a single artifact (aside from the first few hours of using it myself, before I worked that day) since I owned the machine. The computer has not had any issues at all.