Spring Cleaning with SSD

Solid State Drives are an expensive way to give longer life to your PCs - as it did with my 2008 iMac

Earlier this year, I set about resolving some long standing issues with my 2008 iMac by giving it a spring clean fresh install with Mountain Lion.  It removed a lot of build issues and legacy OS files from my iMac given its original Leopard install. And while I was happy with a return to its original snappiness back in 2008, I was still weighing up upgrading over the short term to the 2012 iMacs for even better performance.

Faced with choices for upgrading and adding new tech and gadgets in the coming year, it occurred to me that there may be a a more effective route to getting more bang for the buck on the iMac front.  Cut a long story short, I identified OCZ as one of a number of recommended vendors to use in upgrading the iMac disk drive.

The choice ultimately came down between the DIY approach (with various downside risks for open heart surgery on the iMac without the necessary equipment and dust-free environment) and using a Apple Maintenance provider to perform the work.

Ensuring I took a clean back up with SuperDuper!, this was a relatively straightforward exercise and I had the machine back in few days.

Since restoring data and reinstalling my applications, the value of its performance is not found in benchmarks such as GeekBench, which still rates the 64-bit iMac the 4500-4800 range. With machine start up in less than 20 seconds, applications loading in less than 3 seconds mean a far better snappiness and overall satisfaction of using my iMac. It also increases the life to the machine ahead of being able to handle the forthcoming OS X 10.9 Mavericks release, with its focus on more performance and user based enhancements.

Upgrading the iMac to a 2012 and beyond release is now unlikely to happen for another 12-24 months at the very least.

Recommendation?  Put SSDs in any old PC you night have if you want to prolong its life. Not the most original article I've posted, but worth spelling out the experience and the benefits to readers thinking about it.

Home maintenance

In the last few months, I'd noticed an increasing number of system freezes on my iMac 24 from late 2008. As you will all know, these sorts of things feel generally random and happen at the wrong time when producing or creating something - so they are especially annoying.

The odd one every few months is okay, but in recent weeks web browsing, on-line gaming with Football Championship Manager or editing in iBooks has seen a frequency of freezes get to the stage of being particularly troublesome and worrying. My overall aim for the iMac 24 is to see it through the next 12 months into 2013 (dreams of a retina display iMac + SSD). This summer it will see its fourth OS upgrade in the form of Moutain Lion, and the Mac will probably be a a bit slower again as  result.

Wondering if something was up, it was time to run the key checks on the disk and other subsystems. In terms of quick checks, I did the usual repair permissions with Disk Utility.  But another freeze occurred afterwards,which suggested to me with all the spate of freezes which required power recycling, I'd need to do a directory rebuild using DiskWarrior.   Since doing that, the iMac has felt a bit snappier.

DiskWarrior is an essential utility and well worth the investment

I also took the opportunity to upgrade TechTool Deluxe which came with AppleCare to TechTool Pro 6, which now provides a range of background preventative monitoring tasks as well as range of test across al subsystems across the machine (disk, memory video memory,etc).  It's certainly a comprehenisive tool and again another one worth the considered investment in self-maintenance before calling for the vendor repair option.

TechTool Pro 6 is a worthy tool for a wider range of tests

So far, so good. Beyond, some directory damage to some minor directories, all looks good.  From a browsing standpoint, I decided to disable Flash on Chrome and leave it available on Safari when I do need to watch Flash based content.  It's good to know that HTML5 video has come on leaps and bounds as the preferred video content standard since the advent of iOS and Android devices.

So, time will tell if this has made the difference and if I'm sitting on a major hardware failure. While a disk verification runs in my scripted SuperDuper backup clones of my hard drive on a monthly basis, I think a quarterly directory rebuild in DiskWarrior is the task I'll add to my schedule from now on.