I know a lot of people that get intimidated by computer repair. Luckily for me, I’m not one of those people. Perhaps it’s because I am certified in computer and printer repair –and I used to be pretty good at it. The operative word, however, being “used to”. I had let my techno-geeky skill sett fall by the wayside in recent years to pursue other business ventures. Technology is ever changing and upgrading or repairing a computer takes a little bit of finesse. When my iMac hard drive went kaput, it was time for me to resurrect skills long since unemployed to fix it.
Brushing Up
I made sure I brushed up on my skills by visiting YouTube (on my laptop) and watching a short video about how to install a new hard drive in an iMac. Once I watched it, I felt like my skill set was refreshed enough to commit to a do-it-myself project. I navigated over to Amazon.com and found a new hard drive for about $150. I pointed, clicked, ordered and waited patiently for my new piece of hardware.
Prepping and Installation
When the drive made it to my front door, it was time to get to work. All I needed was a Phillips head screwdriver and an anti-static cable for my wrist –so that I wouldn’t fry anything else inside the box. I unscrewed the screws on all four sides of the back of my iMac, exposing its guts. Then, I unscrewed the old hard drive, unhooked the ribbon cable from the motherboard and bode my dead device a fond farewell. -It had, after all, served me for several years and deserved a proper burial.
I attached the anti-static wrist strap to my wrist and clipped it on to the metal portion of the interior guts of my iMac and dusted the interior with a can of spray-able air. Then, I removed the new hard drive from its casing, and began the installation process.
I placed the hard drive in the cradle where the old drive had lived for so long, screwed it in, and then plugged the ribbon cable into the motherboard. There was nothing to it. I reassembled the back of the computer and turned it on.
Success! I had a new hard drive, all I needed to do was format it.
Finishing Up
Thankfully iMacs are relatively idiot proof for software novices like me; all I had to do was toss my Mac OSX disc in the CD slot and it did all the work for me. What wasn’t fun, however, was transferring all of my old data that I backed up from my old drive onto my new one. That took many hours, but since I was of the extremely anal retentive persuasion in my organizational skills, I already knew where everything needed to go.
That was that. With just a few intelligible flicks of my wrist, my iMac was up and running, and I didn’t have to pay a lot of money for someone else to fix it for me, when I could watch a video and do it all by myself.
More from this Contributor:
Pennies from heaven? They Exist — But Only in Cyberspace
Saving Time and Money on Back to School
How I Tricked Myself into a New Money Attitude