Those of you who follow my daily ramblings know that we took our older 2009 iMac into the Apple Store to have the hard drive replaced under a program from Apple that addresses possible early failures of 1 TB Seagate drives.
Courtesy of Apple
When we dropped the iMac off last Monday, the Apple Genius suggested that they might also be able to fix a long-standing display issue. The LCD looks fine on the right side, but the lower left side looks like twilight is falling. We brought it in to the Apple Store about a year ago, but decided that the replacement cost for the panel was too high. While the area of darkness is annoying, we've learned to live with it. This time, since the iMac had to be opened up anyway to replace the drive, the Genius offered to see if the problem might actually be the driver display board, which is a much less expensive fix.
We got the iMac back today, and I'm happy to report that we have a brand new 1 TB drive installed. All we need to do now is restore our data from a Time Machine backup, and we're back in business.
Unfortunately, the backlight driver board didn't fix the display problem. It looks like the problem is indeed the LCD panel, which we still don't think is worth the cost to repair. The problem seems to be stable; as long as it doesn't get worse, we can still use the Mac. If it does get worse, we can always hook the iMac up to an external display. We could also use it to drive the HDTV in our home theater system. In that case, we wouldn't really need the built-in display.
What would you do with an iMac that has a bad display, but is otherwise in fine shape? Leave a comment below and let us know.
This is too funny, I too have a 2009 iMac that qualified for the hard drive replacement. I went to the Genius Bar, iMac in tow, the Genius confirmed my eligibility but said they couldn’t accept new checkins because this particular Apple Store was closing for renovations. That was on the 29th and with many calls and chats with Apple I finally got the hard drive replaced yesterday. And, my LCD screen had what he called contamination issues. It looked like the northern lights (greyscale, of course) all over the screen. Apple sent someone over tonight and had it installed. 2 days, 2 hardware replacements, its been some fun times.
But it literally is like using a brand new machine. The brightness, colours … right down to the sounds (or lack of) from the hard drive. Its crazy.
Had my hard drive replaced a couple months ago even though I hadn’t experienced any problems. Took it to an Apple repair shop and am delighted with the service. One thing: for can I tell if they actually replaced the drive? Where do I find the serial number of the drive?