iMac finally dying?

I’m starting to get really worried about this machine.

Today we have the painters here painting all the rooms, which means that I’ve had to take the iMac out into the kitchen. As I’ve mentioned before, it has a wonky power socket, and this time it didn’t want to boot up.

Several minutes of jiggling later I finally got the machine to turn on. Now I’m wondering which boot-up is going to be the last. One of these days the machine isn’t going to power up.

Financially, I’m not in a position to buy a replacement yet. The cheapest model costs 1,169€ here but is handicapped with only a gig of RAM which would probably make it slower than this machine (which has 2 gig) despite having a faster processor (a 2 GHz Core 2 Duo as opposed to the 1.83 GHz Core Duo I currently have). RAM is very important for performance when compiling code in Xcode, mostly due to the amount of memory occupied by precompiled headers.

The top-end model would be a big improvement over my current machine — a 2.7 GHz Core 2 Extreme with 2 gig of RAM and a bigger screen (24" up from 17") and hard drive (500 GB up from 160 GB) — but it’s out of my price range at 2,159€.

So really my only two options at this stage are to cross my fingers and hope that this machine holds up, or send it in for repair; and with the deadlines I have looming I just can’t afford to be without this machine, even for a few days.