Apple desktop hardware tends to be pretty reliable. My beige G3 still runs great (although I'm
thinking the monitor may be on it's way out), and I've still got a
Mac 512K that works perfectly as
well - along with an external Apple HD20 hard drive, that, believe
it or not, isn't dead yet.
Then there are the situations when a piece of Apple hardware
breaks down when the machine is out of warranty. For minitowers and
desktops, you can most likely do the work yourself (if you still
have an Apple desktop, it's probably not worth paying someone to
fix it). A bad CD-ROM drive or hard drive should be no problem for
the user who has a bit of computer experience. Simply buy the part
from a Best Buy and install it - 15 minutes max.
But what happens when you have an iMac? About the only real
standard part in there is the hard drive. Your CD-ROM drive goes?
Back to Apple or an Apple dealer - either that or you try eBay for a used CD-ROM from a dead iMac, hoping that
it will work.
Unfortunately just this has happened to my sister's 450 MHz
iMac DV+. The DV+ was the second
revision of the slot loading iMac to include a DVD-ROM drive, and
she found it useful, since she could have friends over and watch a
movie in her room instead of using the downstairs television where
other people might be around to disturb her.
The drive had been acting a bit strangely for a while. I managed
to install Panther with no problems, and the drive worked for a
couple weeks after that. Then one day I heard a loud grinding noise
coming from my sister's room, so I opened the door and found her
trying to import some music files into iTunes from a new CD -
unfortunately it wasn't working very well. The grinding noises kept
getting louder until the machine froze; then I restarted it. I held
the mouse button down in order to force it to eject the disc. It
didn't seem to be able to eject it after several attempts, but we
finally got it out.
Thankfully the disc wasn't damaged, but the drive was certainly
dead. What to do? The machine is worth relatively little these
days, given that it's only a 450 MHz G3. It's probably not worth
spending a fortune on, yet it's still perfectly useable, and
therefore it should probably be fixed.
But how to fix it without spending a lot of money? There's
always eBay, but how do you know the drive you're getting there is
going to work any better than the drive that's already in the
machine?
I thought about going external drive. USB CD-RW drives are
pretty cheap these days, and Mac OS X supports many by
default. This would also allow my sister to make music mix CDs on
her own computer instead of using the PC downstairs. But they still
run about $100, and she would no longer be able to watch DVDs - and
forget about booting from a CD to install future versions of the
Mac OS.
Then I thought, "How much would it cost for me to buy the part
and install it myself?"
Well, Mac-Pro.com
charges $67.77 for the DVD-ROM drive. That's a fair bit, and it
wouldn't really be improving the machine any.
What about upgrading to a drive that both writes CDs and plays
DVDs? It looks like MCE sells them for $299.
Ouch, especially given that my sisters iMac is probably not even
worth that!
At this point it looks like it's going to be an either external
CD-RW drive or a replacement of the internal DVD-ROM drive. Given
that I don't want to be stuck if there should be another problem,
the replacement of the internal DVD-ROM drive seems to make more
sense. But I'll leave that up to her - after all, it is her
computer.
