Death of an iMac
On Saturday night, my trusty iMac had what could probably be described as a technological stroke.
I put it to sleep around eleven o’clock and returned to it an hour or so later. I pressed the space button to wake it and the screen displayed gray and black horizontal lines, something I had never seen before.
That’s not good, I thought.
Though a few lines changed shades when I moved the mouse, the computer was completely unresponsive. I held the power button to shut it down and waited a couple seconds before restarting it. The light gray start-up screen popped up, but there was no chime and when the Apple logo appeared it was distorted by horizontal lines. The login screen was a mess but I was able to sign on. The computer seemed to be working, but the display was scrambled, as if someone had turned it into a giant puzzle and jumbled the pieces. After trying to open the few items on the desktop that I could discern, the cursor turned into the spinning beach ball and the system became unresponsive. I restarted it again and got the same results.
Oh, shit.
Needless to say, I was starting to get nervous. I broke out the computer’s box, which has been a valuable carrying case over the years, retrieved the Disk Utility CD, and restarted the computer from it. Though the screen was still scrambled I was able to run a hardware test. No problems were found.
Something was obviously wrong, so I opened my MacBook and searched Apple’s support site and Google for leads. Others had had the problem, too, and it seemed to be a relatively common issue for older iMacs. Basically, the graphics processor overheats and crashes — sometimes permanently, a fate that has apparently befallen my iMac.
(Overheating, it seems, is a problem with Apple computers in general now. Some Mac owners have installed new fans, others have installed software to run the stock fans at a higher rate, and others have drilled holes in the cases to improve airflow. When I saw this, I almost shit my pants.)
Sitting at my desk, my iMac shut down and unplugged to cool, the tech boards relaying horror stories on my MacBook, it slowly began to dawn on me: after six and a half years of faithful and trouble-free service, my iMac had likely reached the end of its usefulness. I do not know that for sure — I plan to speak to the folks at the UI’s Tech Connections — but for now I have resigned myself to that sad realization.
