If your old iMac is getting long in the tooth it might benefit from a hardware upgrade. Wouldn’t that be expensive, I hear you ask. Not necessarily. Although Apple are infamous for tightly locking up their hardware and making it difficult to get inside to upgrade, the iMacs are an exception…of sorts.
Increase Your Memory
The one thing that Apple make very easy for you to replace is the RAM. I recently found that my ageing iMac was suffering from a lack of memory. I was often having to close down programs in order to have enough free RAM to open other programs and thought it time to look at an (affordable) upgrade. Purchasing RAM from Apple can be expensive, but other manufacturers are available online and cost very little if anything for postage. I found one that delivered two 2GB sticks of RAM to me for $118 all up.
Just One Screw
Directly beneath the Apple logo on the face of the iMac is a single screw. It’s not a special Apple proprietary screw with the head in the shape of the Apple logo, but a simple, every day, Philips head screw. Removing that will enable the cover plate to come off. It is suggested that you lie the iMac face down on a towel to carry out this operation.
Use the Force
Then it’s just a matter of letting loose that black plastic ribbon and giving it a rather forceful tug to un-click the RAM from it’s socket. The new the 2GB RAM modules then go in to replace the old 1GB chips. Another forceful push locks them into place. Folding that black ribbon under and screwing the aluminium cover plate back on completes the process.
