iMac to Windows PC upgrade for my dad

[Unique]

Unique: have you looked at how hard it is to get inside an iMac? Macbook Pros etc are very very easy in comparison, you don't, for example, need to pull out the screen.

Surprised you need to pay £25 to speak to someone to get a quote. I certainly never have had to before!

i don't have an imac so i haven't looked, but i have heard that it can be near impossible in some cases, and just akward in others. there's various websites that do tear downs of stuff and they are often linked to by other sites i read like engadget so i have a flick through. from what i understand the older models are easier to do than others, but ultimately the solution is to find the exact model in question and google up how to upgrade drives and ram and see how hard or easy it is and look for guides and then make a decision if you want to do it or not. writing it off as too hard or impossible without looking isn't something i'd recommend. it might not be that hard after all, but then again it could be a PITA. if it's not that hard then upgrading these things would be a much cheaper solution than buying a new machine, and save a few quid over paying someone else to do it

[quentium]

I'm not sure how easy it is to upgrade those components but a google would tell you. an extra 1gb RAM might not sound like much, but it's 33% more than he has, and RAM can be obtained cheaply. you just remove the 1gb stick and put in a 2gb stick

if the current HDD is 250gb you could replace with a 480gb to 512gb model for about £150. I'm not much of a fan of using external drives personally but you could stick the existing HDD in a caddy and use it for backups. is he even backing up his current drive as if not he could lose everything. you can also consider a 256gb drive which puts him back where he is with the current one, and use an external drive. if the drive is getting really full then that's another thing that can usually slow a machine down, so having a clearout of unnecessary files may help a little bit in the short term, or copy his files to an external drive (and back up to another) and delete from the the internal drive and that may help, but the ram upgrade and SSD could make it acceptable for his current use as what you describe isn't very taxing for a computer so a new one is expensive overkill

replacing HDD/SDD is pretty much the same with mac and pc, of course you need to clone your drive first (you can find guides online), and open the mac and pull out old and replace with new, but sometimes with some mac stuff it's fiddly to say the least to open then so look for guides for the specific model and have a look for youtube videos and prepare youself first, or find someone used to macs who knows how to do it. my MacBook was relatively simply apart from need weird screwdrivers and stuff when I got the drive out, and the ram was a doddle but I know that some newer macs are built to avoid users being able to change most things, from security screws to glue and solder preventing you from physically moving bits. however I think it's later machines than you have that make this really akward

oh yeah, upgrade the OS to the most recent version it can use once you've swapped the SSD if you do this, make sure everything is up to date software wise

Yeah upgrading the RAM is a doddle, looks like it will only be 20 quid to replace the 1GB stick with a 2GB one.

Yeah I think you're probably right, an upgrade on the hard drive size would be good. I think just the amount of photos he has fulls it right up, it is probably impractical to store those on an external hard drive, too inconvenient for him. I could probably stick the old one into my new computer, have that as a dedicated drive for all those photos he needs to store when replacing it, if its compatible. I've been nagging him to clear away some of the junk in the mean time but he is a busy man The main problems getting with it is that the boot up times for the machine and programs are very long and it is very prone to freezing. I think an SSD upgrade will probably fix it right up.

I did a quick look into what it takes for an early 2008 iMac model and I stumbled upon this video which shows how to replace the HDD with an SSD, and it looks really challenging. Doable, with a lot of research and understanding, but very hard none the less. I don't need to worry about glue or security screws thankfully, so I think I could do it myself if I can't find anyone else who specializes in it.

What is the best way of getting the OS onto a new drive?

Surprised you need to pay £25 to speak to someone to get a quote. I certainly never have had to before!

Yeah it sucks, some kind of charge to pay to get tech support I think.

[Unique]

Yeah upgrading the RAM is a doddle, looks like it will only be 20 quid to replace the 1GB stick with a 2GB one.

Yeah I think you're probably right, an upgrade on the hard drive size would be good. I think just the amount of photos he has fulls it right up, it is probably impractical to store those on an external hard drive, too inconvenient for him. I could probably stick the old one into my new computer, have that as a dedicated drive for all those photos he needs to store when replacing it, if its compatible. I've been nagging him to clear away some of the junk in the mean time but he is a busy man The main problems getting with it is that the boot up times for the machine and programs are very long and it is very prone to freezing. I think an SSD upgrade will probably fix it right up.

I did a quick look into what it takes for an early 2008 iMac model and I stumbled upon this video which shows how to replace the HDD with an SSD, and it looks really challenging. Doable, with a lot of research and understanding, but very hard none the less. I don't need to worry about glue or security screws thankfully, so I think I could do it myself if I can't find anyone else who specializes in it.

What is the best way of getting the OS onto a new drive?

personally i'd delete some temp files first and then just clone the drive. i'd google free mac clone software or google how to upgrade drive, or sometimes when you buy an SSD you get clone software with it. then swap drives and then use the mac update to ensure the os is up to date and if necessary get a disc or download to update to the latest version that mac supports. you could do that first, but it would obviously run quicker on the SSD and if you clone first and it goes pear shape you have the original HDD so not lost anything

[b0redom]

At the risk of sounding like a stuck record. Even a 2008 iMac seems to be worth north of £200 on eBay. Might be worth selling his and putting the money towards a new one?

As regards cloning disks. You can use SuperDuper to create a bootable copy of the disk inside the mac, and even boot it off USB/Firewire.

You could also take a time machine backup of the mac, install the OS on the new disk and then point it at the time machine backup and it will restore it.

Personally, I'd do both - take a superduper backup and use an external USB drive to do the time machine thing (I presume he's doing this anyway?).

[quentium]

personally i'd delete some temp files first and then just clone the drive. i'd google free mac clone software or google how to upgrade drive, or sometimes when you buy an SSD you get clone software with it. then swap drives and then use the mac update to ensure the os is up to date and if necessary get a disc or download to update to the latest version that mac supports. you could do that first, but it would obviously run quicker on the SSD and if you clone first and it goes pear shape you have the original HDD so not lost anything

Okay yeah I think I'm gonna do for that. When you clone the drive where does it clone too? Do you need an external hard drive for that? So on a clean SSD, the Mac will just update to the latest osx automatically? Or will it so that because of the drive cloning?

At the risk of sounding like a stuck record. Even a 2008 iMac seems to be worth north of £200 on eBay. Might be worth selling his and putting the money towards a new one?

As regards cloning disks. You can use SuperDuper to create a bootable copy of the disk inside the mac, and even boot it off USB/Firewire.

You could also take a time machine backup of the mac, install the OS on the new disk and then point it at the time machine backup and it will restore it.

Personally, I'd do both - take a superduper backup and use an external USB drive to do the time machine thing (I presume he's doing this anyway?).

Honestly £200 for this old machine is pretty tempting, it would defintely save up enough for those refurbished Mac minis you were showing earlier... Got some thinking to do, will ask dad what he thinks.

Okay yeah I will probably do both, how much space will a time machine backup take on a USB drive? I think the largest we have is a 32GB.

With regards to clising drive, I don't quite understand where the cloned drive is stored if there is no hard drive in there

[b0redom]

You need a dedicated USB drive to do it properly (and it will need to be approximately the size of the internal HDD). If he's not doing it already, and he cares about his data, he really should be doing that anyway. Especially on a disk that is ~ 6 years old!

[Unique]

Okay yeah I think I'm gonna do for that. When you clone the drive where does it clone too? Do you need an external hard drive for that? So on a clean SSD, the Mac will just update to the latest osx automatically? Or will it so that because of the drive cloning?

you would usually stick the new SSD in a caddy, run the clone software (when I got a SSD once I got a caddy and software with it, and the software worked with mac too, it boot to the dvd disc and closed the drive), it should make a copy. remove the old drive, insert the new one and put the old drive in the caddy as a backup

as someone else mentioned and I think I mentioned before, backing up the drive if he's never done it before is a good idea if he doesn't want to lose everything

btw selling the machine is an option, but I presume you would want the new machine first, then sell the old one so he's not left without a machine for long

[walibe]

As with much of the above. I am currently in a 'cyber role' and was seriously fed up with dealing with Windows (and some extent linux/bsd but less so) problems every day and didn't want to have to deal with the same sort of stuff when I got home, I just wanted something that worked (complete reversal of what I wanted for the last 16 years of my life) and an iMac/macbook was the answer to that. Mac minis are a nice compromise at the moment in price/specs and use of some PC components (monitor/keyboard/mouse).

[peterb]

As with much of the above. I am currently in a 'cyber role' and was seriously fed up with dealing with Windows (and some extent linux/bsd but less so) problems every day and didn't want to have to deal with the same sort of stuff when I got home, I just wanted something that worked (complete reversal of what I wanted for the last 16 years of my life) and an iMac/macbook was the answer to that. Mac minis are a nice compromise at the moment in price/specs and use of some PC components (monitor/keyboard/mouse).

Same for me - done the Windows bit, still running a Linux server, but moving to Mac for everyday stuff and keeping Linux on a server.

And its a whole lot less stressful - no more agonising of AMD or Intel, Nvidia or whatever - will the drivers work? etc. I can just get on and use it. I still have a laptop with win7 on it for legacy applications, or those for which there is no Mac equivalent. But I can't see me buying into the new Microsoft business model. And when I get those marketing e mails offering the latest and greatest graphics/mobo/processor - no temptation. they can get binned unread.

And that Linux experience is still useful on the OS X platform when you drop down into the shell.

[b0redom]

And when I get those marketing e mails offering the latest and greatest graphics/mobo/processor - no temptation. they can get binned unread.

This alone has saved me hundreds!