On the death of an iMac

It appears my iMac is dead. It was getting a bit long in the tooth, I bought it in February of 2003 as a refurbished unit from Small Dog Electronics and it’s seen a lot of use since then, mainly as a web testing machine and iTunes jukebox. In any case it’s almost always turned on and doing something.

It locked up on me yesterday, it’s been doing that a lot recently. I let it sit for a while and the screen goes to black and I come back later and it won’t wake back up. I usually just turn it off and back on and all is well. Yesterday I did that and it kernel panicked.

I can’t even get the thing to boot off of a CD, making me think it’s a mainboard issue and not a RAM issue. I may try to get it fixed, or at least diagnosed to see if it’s worth it to even try. I found two Apple repair places in Columbia. One, MXN, is way overpriced for what I need. The second, MMCS will give me an estimate for $30. So we’ll probably be taking the iMac to them next week.

In the meantime, I manged to get my iTunes library moved over to the Dell. I tried copying straight from the iPod to the Dell using Xplay, but that didn’t work as planned. So I used MacDrive instead and copied my library over from my iMac backup drive. I lost maybe twenty songs that way, but at least my music is still usable.

Unfortunately, XPlay made my iPod go nuts and stop working. So I reformatted the iPod for Windows and tried to sync it back with the Dell. iTunes has hung up my computer every time I’ve tried this so far. So I uninstalled iTunes and Quicktime, installed Quicktime, upgraded it to Quicktime Pro and then re-downloaded and installed iTunes. Now I’m charging the iPod in the dock via the firewire port. I’m hoping that a fully charged iPod will behave better. I can hope right?