Who designed the tray-loader iMac innards? So close... yet, so far...

[Paul F.]

I'm digging in to a Tray Loader iMac this morning... finally got to the HD so I could hook it up to my firewire bridge (this one doesn't like to boot from CD, and we're too cheap to buy another CD drive for it...).

Apple made the motherboard and drives all come out as a unit... Cool..
They screwed or clipped all the cable connectors to the mother board that removes.. Dumb
The whole tray slides out as a unit. Cool.
But enclosed the HD and CD drive in a "cage". Dumb.
The CD drive lifts out with a slight push backwards and pull up. Cool.
The direction of that movement also allows it to be pushed back into the case when assembled. Dumb.


They were SO CLOSE to making the Tray Loader cool to maintain in the innards..

But yet, so far.

In some ways the slot-loaders were NOT an improvement.. yet, I can do 80% of what I need to do to slot loaders with only opening the bottom door (RAM, and access the HD with a firewire bridge... though that would be worlds easier if they'd mounted the damn HD just 3/8" further BACK! ).


Oh.. my drive-clone is done...
Now to "assemble in reverse order"..

[mattkime]

if computers were easy, you wouldn't have a job!

[Paul F.]

Well.. you know the old saying...
"If you make something idiotproof... they'll just invent a better idiot"..

So, I would still have a job

[Paul F.]

On a side note..
It's really quite suprising how nicely a G3 333 iMac runs 10.3.9...

No speed demon, but it chugs along happily..

[Mike Sellers]

Yeah, those are a bear. Not as bad as an iBook but still pretty tough. Sliding the whole assembly back in and making sure the CD tray facing pops back into place is no picnic either.

[BigGuynRusty]

It has PB or iB innards can't recall which at the moment, yes a real bear.

BGnR

[Jem]

Paul F. Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> On a side note..
> It's really quite suprising how nicely a G3 333
> iMac runs 10.3.9...
>
> No speed demon, but it chugs along happily..


Paul, how much memory, and is that the stock hard drive? If not, how big, and how much free space.

I find with the "marginal" iMacs, th amount of memory and hard disk make a huge difference.

Thanks!

Jem

[Paul F.]

Jem;

These we got from a local university (we have 5 of 'em), and they were upgraded to 512Mb RAM. They have 7gb HD's in 'em for the most part, and my "minimum" OS and apps image is 4.2Gb... I managed to pare it down from 6.5gb (which left precious little space on the HD's!).

Getting that damn CD bezel lined up and popped through it's slot makes me want to take a patternmakers rasp to the hole it fits through....

[Harbourmaster]

Paul F. Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Getting that damn CD bezel lined up and popped
> through it's slot makes me want to take a
> patternmakers rasp to the hole it fits
> through....


This sounds like a problem with your technique Paul as I have never had any trouble getting the CD to align with it's opening.

[Paul F.]

Maybe mine are just bigger than yours