On Wed, Sep 04, 2013 at 08:37:26PM -0400, Bruce Walker wrote:
Have you inspected /var/log/system.log afterward? I'd look
particularly for disk errors.
That was plan A, however, it will no longer boot at all.
Fortunately, a kind list member offered me one of his Friends and Family
apple discounts. I'm also planning on replacing the 4G of apple memory
with 16G of OWC memory. So, by the time the dust settles, I'll have
a quad core 2.3GHz I7 mac mini, with 16GB of ram, a 1TB fusion drive,
a 27" thunderbolt monitor, apple care for the cpu, keyboard and magic
track pad for about $2100.
In contrast, circa 1985, I bought a 10 MHz 286 AT clone, with a 20MB
(IIRC)
hard drive, and 1 MB of 0 waitstate memory, and black and white
monitor for
about $1700.
It's funny how a mid range home/office computer has stayed at around
$2,000.
It looks like the display was 720x350 pixels, so I've got 12 times the
resolution, before adding a second monitor. 1000 times the cpu clocks
per second, not counting instruction efficiency, and supplemental
processors,
16,000 times the memory, about 50,000 times the disk space, at I don't
know how many times the through put.
And that's not even comparing with the Osborne 1, that my father bought
for about the same amount of money a few years previously.
It looks like 1980-1984 gas was about $1.20/gallon,
http://www.randomuseless.info/gasprice/gasprice.html
So the Osborne 1 and the AT clone were about 1400 gallons of gas.
The mac mini system is about 525 gallons of gas or a bit more than
a third as much in terms of gas. I think it was Peter Egan that would
measure the cost of cars, and parts in units of a Pizza and a pitcher
of beer. I'm afraid I don't remember prices of those well enough from
back then to compare.
Meanwhile, when I get the chance, probably a few weeks from now, I'll
pull the iMac apart, and swap in a different drive to test it.
Fortunately, I didn't have much of import on the internal drive, the
only thing really important was my lightroom catalog, that just last
week I had copied over to my rejuvenated laptop. The raw files are
elsewhere, so I only lost the edits on a couple of not terribly
important
sets of photos, and that's only if I don't recover the drive, so
I pretty much dodged a bullet on that one.
