Apple Archive

Repairing an Older Mac: Worth the Price?

- 2003.12.05

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.

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