iMac survival story

[normcook]

My iMac (333MHz blueberry) was in the trunk of my friends car when we were in an auto accident(coming home from the dorms for spring break). We went from 47mph to a sudden stop. Then, after we were all out of the car waiting for the tow truck and such, a ford ranger came around the corner and hit the trunk, directly where my iMac was. The car was totalled. So when the time came to worry about the state of my iMac, things were pretty dim. When I opened the trunk the next morning, there were just a few small cracks in her blueberry shell and some black scuff marks. I fired her up and she started up without a hitch. Everything seems perfectly fine, but I have a question about possible internal damage that would lead to future problems. I just put a 60GB IBM drive in her not too long ago and I thought for sure that thing was going to be shot. Is it probable that it or anything else inside suffered damage that will cause it to fail anytime soon. I know I am somewhat asking to peer into a crystal ball, but I am just looking for either a little reassurance that everything is mint, or some warning of something I should look into. Thanks in advance.

[mervTormel]

wow. 47 to 0 is no small jolt. had your seatbelts on, didn't you? or this story would have some other fine points in it like, "wear your seatbelts if you like eating with your teeth!"

as for your hardware, well, it's like this. it may have lost some mileage. i think disk drives have certain density and durability, moreso when they are off and the heads are parked. but it would greatly depend on how/which way the force was exerted on the mac and its innards. sounds like the plastic shell absorbed a lot of the impact. and the frame prolly torqued a little to absorb the rest. was there a bunch of junk in the trunk? anything to distribute the load?

cd drives are prolly more fragile. keep an eye on it. a motherboard don't have any moving parts, per se. some connector may have been jarred loose and may disconnect in the future. have you ever tried to get inside an iMac? they're pretty rugged.

it's certainly not mint, market-wise, but it's a novelty, and it may very well keep on chuggin' for a long while. well, until the next OSX release that requires 350Mhz ;[ keep us aprised.

[gaudior]

Macs have long had a reputation for ruggedness, and a tendency to live far longer than thought possible. I used a Mac Plus in college that had bounced down 5 steps, and slid 30 feet across an icy parking lot. Aside from some scratches, and the screen brightness knob coming loose, it continued to serve for several more years, when all the B&W macs were replaced with color models.<p>It is true that the weakest link is probably the CD-ROM drive. I would also be on the lookout for flakies to develop from loosened cables, memory chips, etc.

[digitalone]

You should run a low level diagnostic on the drive, but if it booted and isn't running slower than normal, you are probably golden. You will need to get a third party utility for a complete diagnostic, probably a UNIX or Linux based one, because you are looking for a percantage of bad sectors. I have seen drives boot and run with nearly 30% of their sectors bad. It reduces your available space, but the damn thing will still work!

As far as the otehr components, yes, the optical drives are succeptible, but probably not hurt if they are running fine now. But heat building up in the motherboard can cause any small cracks or fissures caused by the accidient to spread, so keep it out of direct sunlight and so forth. There isn't a lot that you can do on this issue, but you will be surprised. Again, not something that is an immediate concern, and like mentioned before, you might have lost some mileage (like from 15 years of flawless use to 14).

Sean

[tlarkin]

I am surprised the CRT didn't emploed at that impact, they are huge vaccum tubes.

[digitalone]

Yeah, I am a little surprised that there wasn't more damage.

I have actually SEEN a CRT explode once, it fell out of the back of a truck and just popped into a shower of glass and plastic. Pretty ugly.

Sean

[jeffo]

as long as there was no one around i think that seeing that would have been pretty cool actually. A buddy of mine in college had an old tv that he took a gun to and he had to shoot it a few times to get it to go off. it was a small gun, but still.

[tlarkin]

You guys know there is radaiation among other dangerous materials in CRTs.

[Mikey-San]

Sadly, this tale doesn't involve cameras. We didn't think about it at the time.

I was one of the unfortunate souls who had an original 15" Multiple Scan monitor. It failed. Apple replaced it. It failed. Apple replaced it.

After a year or two, it died, as well.

That was, as they say, the last straw. I bought a 15" Multiple Scan AV (the really nice one that replaced the original) and am, to this day, happy with it as a second display for my Titanium.

What happened to the old busted one? Well, a friend and I took some black powder rifles and, well, shot the monitor to ****. It was /awesome,/ lemme tell you.

CRTs, being vacuum-sealed, are awesome when they break. Air goes in the CRT, glass comes out. It was a lot of fun, and a COMPLETE mess to clean up. (We put tarps down, but we still found debris more than fifteen feet from the display.)

[tlarkin]

Originally posted by tlarkin
You guys know there is radaiation among other dangerous materials in CRTs.
...but blowing the $*!# out of them is fun!

My roomate took an axe to his broken 27" TV once. It had been repaired numerous times and finally went out of warranty. He complained enough where they admitted it was a lemon and got a new one. So he smashed the old one, and we got pictures and I think video of him doing it. Then he proceeded to light it on fire. Needless to say he was real drunk.