Your dying Macs

[retta283]

I know a lot of people on this board have quite a large collection of Macs, and I was curious how many of you have Macs that are clearly dying? Whether that means something common like the HDD, or a PSU, or some serious hardware issues that will not be easy to fix.

Right now, I have about 15 Macs left. Currently most of them are running great. The 2010 iMac in my sig had a GPU issue, which I can't be bothered to fix. iBook G3 from 2003 went nuclear a few years ago. All of the others run smooth and without flaw. I am waiting for cap failure on my 2005 iMac, but I am prepared to replace if they do die.

I did pull out an old 2007 24" iMac recently, old work computer. It is not running well. First, it has some nasty screen problems, the tint is very yellowed and there's painfully obvious image retention in the screen. HDD is showing signs of dying soon, from strange noise to poor operation and bad scans with programs like DriveDX. Lastly, the fans appear to be damaged or off their bearings. Depending on the tilt of the screen, I can hear the fan grinding against the case constantly, very annoying. It also runs insane hot, so not sure what I will be doing with it.

 

[Amethyst1]

Post your non-working/dead Macs!

I get the feeling we all have at least one or eleven of these tucked away somewhere. They may be future projects, donors, or even cobblestones for your own paved road to best-laid intentions. So I’ll start.

forums.macrumors.com

Isn't this nearly the same?

 

[retta283]

Shoot, MR poor search got me again. Couldn't find that thread in search. This could be deleted then

 

[Alexis Trinquet]

Well I'd say the other topic is more for Macs that are already No-op or flat out dead already.

But I digress...
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Anyways I'll add my own: my ol' iMac G4.

Currently, I don't know why but it's starting to act iffy, sometimes it refuses to power on and emits a worrysome buzzing noise (think the 60Hz mains hum on steroids), other times it seem to be rock solid before hardlocking solid.

I tore it apart yesterday (and forgot to put thermal compound *facepalm*), couldn't find anything wrong, no swollen caps or leaky PRAM battery. (note to self: buy thermal paste and don't forget how difficult a iMac is to tear down!)

I wouldn't consider it as "dying" but rather "temperamental", on the other hand my '99 G3 is rock-solid, nothing to say about it.

Also quite bizarrely, my G4 has a later logic board in it, despite being a early 15" unit, when I looked around on iFixit on teardown guides, I could see that the unit they tore down had a different LB (the IDE connectors were laid out differently), on my unit the IDE ports are side by side.

 

[z970]

@Alexis Trinquet Before I tore it apart and put the mod project in hiatus, my 800mhz 17" iMac G4 behaved the same way. I ended up replacing the PRAM battery, and wouldn't you know it, it boot up every time it was turned on afterwards.

Issue solved, just like that.

I would also test the battery's voltage with a multimeter. Even if it seems good, I would replace it anyway to see how the iMac responds.

 

[eyoungren]

I'll just say that all of the Macs I currently use are fully functional. I don't like being limited when it comes to using my tech, so computers that develop problems that can't immediately (or within a reasonable time frame) be fixed get shut off and put aside. That's one reason I have multiple Macs. If one has a problem, I just switch.

I dealt with all the problems of my Quicksilver because I didn't want to be beaten by the problems it was having. But eventually, once the Quad came in, it was relegated to my non-functional pile.I use it mainly for parts now.

 

[Alexis Trinquet]

@Alexis Trinquet Before I tore it apart and put the mod project in hiatus, my 800mhz 17" iMac G4 behaved the same way. I ended up replacing the PRAM battery, and wouldn't you know it, it boot up every time it was turned on afterwards.

Issue solved, just like that.

I would also test the battery's voltage with a multimeter. Even if it seems good, I would replace it anyway to see how the iMac responds.

I don't have a PRAM battery on hand unfortunately, but it's still holding up a good charge (about 3.4v, still surprising given how aged this battery is).

I only had left it out for 30 minutes then put it back, maybe that fixed it? I'll probably never know.

My iMac G3 on the other hand, even without a PRAM battery it doesn't act funny at all, save for the clock loosing time (but that's expected behavior).