The Great iMac Swap

When I learned that Microcenter was selling new 20 inch iMacs at $200 off, I decided it was time for a change. Combined with the money I had already saved toward just such a purchase later in the year, I could get my wife a new machine for only about $600. That was too good a deal to pass up, so last night we drove up to the store. I sat her down at a 20 inch iMac already on display and changed the desktop picture to a solid color to make sure she was okay with both the color gradients and the lighting differentials of the newer, cheaper glossy screens. She actually liked them better. So, I bought her the 2.0 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo model with a 250GB hard drive and Radeon 2400HD video GPU with 128 MB of video RAM and took it home.

Setting up the new iMac was relatively easy. Only shortly after we watched the introductory video did a wizard ask us if we wanted to transfer data from another Mac, which we did. I hooked up a Firewire 400 cable between machines and then booted her old Mac while holding down the “T” key on the new aluminum keyboard it had been attached to. That didn’t work; the iMac booted normally instead of into Target Disk Mode. Recognizing the problem as one due to the newer keyboard, I swapped it with the older Apple keyboard and tried again. It worked that time. The wizard on the new machine recognized both the Firewire connection and the old machine and began transferring files. It was “sit back and wait” time. My wife had over 100GB of data to transfer, so it took the machine a couple of hours to move everything over. At the end of that, I hooked up the new iMac to our network via a CAT 6 cable and ran Software Update until it had downloaded and installed every available change. I then launched several of her applications to make sure they ran error free and then shut the machine down and added a 1GB stick of DDR2 RAM to kick it up to 2GB. After putting it back together and setting it in its rightful place on my wife’s desk, I cranked it up and tested its operation again and saw no problems.

Typically, I’d take her old machine and find someone in the family who wanted it. Not this time. I’ve always had an affection for flat panel iMacs, so I’m going to use her old one in my office in the place of my MacBook Pro being hooked up to a 20 inch display. I’m going to set it up by cloning my MBP’s hard disk onto the iMac and then load copies of my iPhoto and iTunes libaries onto it, too, as well as most of my most frequently used data. Then, I’m just going to sit and use it for a while. In time, I may grow weary of having to maintain two sets of data and feel like it’s time to set the machine free and give it a better home. I may also take the calculated risk of replacing the iMac’s virbrating optical drive with a new one and upgrade its hard disk to a newer, larger one. But, for now, I’d just like to use it for a bit to kick myself loose writing. I also feel better about having a machine with an internal iSight. That way, my external and rare Firewire-driven iSight remains a spare.