Wow, I’m quite behind on this little series, and so many things have changed in the past 6-9 months regarding all these computers and stuff it’s almost not worth continuing, but whatever, I’m still going to tell it.
So, move back to June 2018. It was the same week that I got the G5. At work we were doing some cleaning and clearing of space — the shop is incredibly small and we really needed more shelf space for, well, anything else, and part of the space I was to clear out had some old iMacs on it.
Funny thing is, I had already noticed those and wanted them before this happened, but never bothered to just take them. On this day, my boss was simply “take ’em home or throw ’em in the trash” with regards to them so you can guess what I did given the choice.
What would come home were not one, not two, not three, but four (yes, four) 2007 iMacs – 3 20 inch units and one 24 inch unit, all 7,1 series machines with Core 2 Duo processors. Modern enough but at the end of their support life for sure, being just over a decade old at this time.
They were surplus from a local private school and were set to boot locally, but log into remote accounts on a server. They also, for security sake, had firmware passwords enabled, something I’d have to get past if I were actually going to make use of these machines for whatever good they could be for me.
Thankfully, there’s a quirky little backdoor to the firmware passwords on Apple computers — at least, ones with removable memory. If you change the RAM configuration in the machine, there will be, for whatever reason, one boot you get where the firmware is not password protected. In that one boot you get you have the option to do a PRAM reset and clear the password, which is exactly what I did to these machines. Boom, done, the password was clear.
Next we move to the OS. The most recent these machines can run without patchers, processor upgrades or other crap I don’t want to deal with is El Capitan (MacOS 10.11.) They already had that one them but given how they were used in a school I wanted a fresh start, and so I downloaded El Cap from some super shady site, wrote the .dmg file to a flash drive and installed from that, formatting each machines hard drive as I did the reinstall.
I mentioned there were 4 machines total. One of the 3 20 inch machines had a dead super drive. It became a donor for additional RAM and non-damaged (scratched) display glass for the machine I would keep in my room. I would take the next least scratched glass panel and put it on the machine which would go in the main room of the house, and take the remains of that last 20 inch machine and give those to a co worker so he could fix an iMac he owned. It was of minimal use to me by that stage.
That left the 24 inch machine. It was an odd one — its display was dim, and seemed broken at first look, so I figured I’d sell it. A few months after bringing the other machines home I took it to my room and powered it up so that I could do the same reset that I had done to the other two machines and during this process I found out the display was simply dimmed. While it did have some stuck pixel issues, the machine was actually in fine shape all around. Cool, that’s a 3rd machine to use. Now, I don’t actually use it for much of anything ever as it’s honestly just too damned big — it just kind of sits in my office there if I want to use it.
Let’s move on to today, basically 9 months after I originally got these machines. They are all still working fine, running El Cap on about 4 gigs of RAM each, if memory serves (no pun intended there.) I basically use the one in my room in the same way I used to use my second monitor — it’s become my video watching machine while I use my main Windows machine for everything else — even now I’m watching a Druaga1 stream while I type this! Turns out it uses about as much power as the second display did, and has some benefits since it is its own computer as opposed to just another display on the main machine, so, yeah, it’s worked well for me for quite a few months now.
So long as things hold out I’ll continue to use these machines for what they can do, and once they are too damned obsolete to do anything really important, well… I’ll just deal with that when the time comes. For some reason integrated graphics and Core 2 Duo processors still seem to be just capable enough when running an operating system other than Windows.
Speaking of Core 2 Duo… the next entry in this series will have another C2D based machine — with a twist.
More to come, as always.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_(Intel-based)#Aluminum_iMac
P.S. — I’ve had to gather together keyboards and mice for these machines — they didn’t come with the stock Apple stuff, for whatever that’s worth to the reader — I literally only got the computers themselves.
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