Yesterday and last night, we had some nasty storms. Woke up this morning to blinking clocks, which means we had a short power failure at some point. I don't shut my iMac down at night because that's when backup jobs run. The not even 2 year old iMac is connected to a UPS battery backup. When I went to the computer this morning, it was shut down. That's not a good sign. The battery should have kept it running without a hitch as it usually does.
I started the computer and the drive made harsh whirring noises before finally booting from my SuperDuper backed up Firewire drive. Got an error message that the internal hard drive was damaged and could not be mounted. Disk Utility couldn't even see it. Not. Good. Shut down and turned off the SuperDuper drive (more to protect it now than anything else) and restarted to a blinking folder with a question mark all the while the machine is making sounds that can only be described as painful. Ugh.
I could call AppleCare and pretend that I had no idea the drive died due to electrical failure. I'm sure they can tell. I may still have the hard drive replaced so I can pass the computer down to one of the kids. Truth is, I've been itching to upgrade to something that can handle more than 4 GB RAM. I am constantly paging out memory, especially when I have to run VMWare Fusion for Windows XP.
The best part of this experience? I won't lose one byte of data. I practice what I preach to others. My entire drive is mirrored nightly to a bootable firewire drive. My most important work files are copied to an Amazon S3 disk via JungleDisk. I save files to DropBox now out of habit. And I have my laptop and iPhone. Or it's in the cloud. It's more the hassle of the time lost in switching the computers that's annoying me. I don't think about backing up anymore. It just happens. And right now I'm grateful.
So I'm looking at the 27-inch iMac, with the cheaper upgrade to 8 GB RAM. A few months ago I heard that Apple was having trouble with these. Anyone with a recent model still having issues? It's hard to tell from the Apple Support forums if the issues are fixed on the machines they're shipping now.
Judi Sohn 
3 responses to “Looks like it’s time for a new iMac”
I’d file the AppleCare support and then sell the old iMac (Natalie could use one if you didn’t have any use for it in your home). Or look into the warranty/guarantee for your UPS.I suppose it depends on where your own moral center sits, but the $350 or whatever you paid for AppleCare is more than the cost of a hard drive, so nobody’s losing out if you ask AppleCare to replace your hard drive. The computer works – the hard drive doesn’t – and AppleCare wouldn’t be able to tell that it was electrical failure at all.But hey, seriously, I’m interested in buying it whether or not you file the AppleCare claim. Natalie’s could use a computer in her bedroom.
Actually, AppleCare did cover the drive replacement! So the computer is going to Laini. Sorry…
Be sure to aftermarket the RAM. FWIW, I ordered my iMac from ExperCom out of Utah. They added the RAM and have a separate warranty on it.I also considered PowerMax in Portland OR (would have been free shipping) but they didn’t have any of the model I was looking for during the dark (or yellow?) display days.