imac debate

[millerb415]

my mom has an imac from 2009 nine and it is showing its age primarily in the start ups and responsiveness, she does not do anything that requires more that power than what is already in the imac. my mom likes mac and uses them at the school she teaches at so she would have to get another mac and this seemed like a cheaper way to give her what she needs. she will go online with only one or two browsers open at a time, use pages, and create vacation albums with photos, not photoshopping them. so i was wondering if it would be worth it to just replace the hard-drive with an ssd and clean it out while i am in there how much performance gain could she expect to gain from doing this?

[ALwin]

20 minutes ago, millerb415 said:

snip

Replacing the platter drive with an SSD should give it a few more years of life.  Perhaps adding more memory if possible.

 

EDIT: at the same time take a can of compressed air and dust out all the vents, fans, etc. while you're opening it up to replace the HDD.

[millerb415]

it might have been the 2010 model

13 minutes ago, ALwin said:

Replacing the platter drive with an SSD should give it a few more years of life.  Perhaps adding more memory if possible.

i know that the 27 inch just came out and my parents got the smaller one with the same specs so i think it has 16 gigs of ram so i think that should be fine but an ssd is what i was thinking. I know when you instal a hard drive on a mac the fans go out of control how do i work around that so that they will change speeds and not run at 100 percent all of the time?

[ALwin]

Just now, millerb415 said:

it might have been the 2010 model

i know that the 27 inch just came out and my parents got the smaller one with the same specs so i think it has 16 gigs of ram so i think that should be fine but an ssd is what i was thinking. I know when you instal a hard drive on a mac the fans go out of control how do i work around that so that they will change speeds and not run at 100 percent all of the time?

If your parents' iMac already has 8-16GB of memory, you don't need to add more.  I meant only if it had under 8GB.

 

About fan control, I don't know how it works on a Mac.  But as I added in my previous comment, use a can of compressed air to clean the fans and vents of all dust that might have accumulated.  I recommend doing this at least once a year for all Apple computer owners.

 

In case you need a guide on how to open the iMac:

https://www.ifixit.com/Device/iMac_Intel_21.5%22

[millerb415]

5 minutes ago, ALwin said:

If your parents' iMac already has 8-16GB of memory, you don't need to add more.  I meant only if it had under 8GB.

 

About fan control, I don't know how it works on a Mac.  But as I added in my previous comment, use a can of compressed air to clean the fans and vents of all dust that might have accumulated.  I recommend doing this at least once a year for all Apple computer owners.

 

In case you need a guide on how to open the iMac:

https://www.ifixit.com/Device/iMac_Intel_21.5%22

thank you so much