The Tale of the iMac

Joan's iMac turned ten years old in 2018, and early this year we decided it was finally time to upgrade from Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) to El Capitan, (10.11), the last macOS release that supports this generation of iMacs. An old operating system meant old versions of apps, which meant more and more web pages and other features just didn't work any more.

The 24" iMac of 2008.

After the upgrade, the computer was incredibly slow. Painfully slow. I tried various remedies suggested on the internet, but to no effect.

Typically a large slowdown indicates that the hard drive is starting to fail, but the coincidence of it happening simultaneously with the upgrade left us uncertain. Still, at ten years old, it was beyond time to replace the original hard drive, so we decided to replace the old spinning-disk hard drive with an SSD (Solid State Device) -- no moving parts to fail. Plus that would also help the speed issue ... maybe.

After two months of procrastination, waiting for a slack time in use of the computer, I took the iMac to The Computer Store on a Monday afternoon. It received a fresh install of El Capitan, a 500GB SSD drive transplant (a non-trivial operation on a machine built before SSDs were around), and our old apps were all copied over. In many cases our app versions were frozen: they were so old that the usual upgrade paths weren't available any more, but the new apps in the Apple App Store wanted a later version of OS X than El Capitan. "Pages," the word-processing part of iWork '08, was a prime example of this. No upgrade path, and the program in the App Store wanted OS X 10.13 or higher! All the old programs were copied to the SSD for us.

We got a call late Wednesday afternoon that it was ready. Apprehensive but hopeful, I picked it up Thursday and we turned it on. Wonderfully improved; Joan took some timings:

The right-hand column is the speed-up factor.

I can definitely recommend The Computer Store. Thanks, Saed and James!