Journaling June - Day 15-16
16^th June 2026

Journaling June Day 15-16
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Welp, the 27" iMac, after reverse-engineering the packaging, turned out to have an i3 CPU instead of the i5 claimed (I politely notified the the seller about this, disguised as a thank you note, and they said sorry about that). So, like with my Mac Pro, I had to research which CPUs are compatible, with the view to getting it to the spec I would like (similar to my current main desktop), and compare prices to see by how much I might have been short-changed by. To the latter, it seems possibly not much since the lowest priced compatible i5 is not worth much either. The other issue is the prospect of replacing the CPU; I was nervous about removing the glass to gain access to replace the faulty hard drive, but that went smoothly, but leaving the glass off to await a CPU means more potential for dust getting on the inside of that and on the screen itself (annoying to find after it has all been reassembled), and now to have to actually remove the screen completely and dismantle the system more to replace the CPU (although having the chance to thoroughly evict any dust will be a bonus)... (it's possible to replace the hard drive without actually removing the screen). Or I could put the glass back on and then take it off again, which is do-able. In any event, I installed the latest version of Kubuntu on the freshly installed SSD; the system booted straight from my prepared SD card without fuss.

It turned out that there was a likely-compatible Core i7 up for auction and I bid on that and won it  for half the price of the next model up (which is most certainly compatible). Also, the RAM is presently 8GB, annoyingly spread across four modules, so I have to replace all of them to upgrade it to 16GB... or if I wanted to spend more money than I need to I could go shell out for 32GB... or I could get 2 x 8GB modules and leave space for a future upgrade. Too many options. Speaking of which, I decided that since I was going through all of this rigmarole I should elect for a larger SSD than the 240GB I'd put in it. I found two going cheap so I hope they arrive with good health (always a problem with second-hand SSDs as I was reminded recently when I ordered a replacement system for a client which arrived with an SSD with only 50% health).

I had a client to visit on Monday, which went well - I had to carry their system back to them on my bike (luckily it was a SFF which could fit in a pannier), and a laptop to post off (that parcel fit in my rucksack. But Tuesday ended up being one of my down days and the weather wasn't too inspiring so I stayed in and mostly just either sat at my computer or walked round in circles. Oh, but I did recap the old Abit motherboard I received the other week... I'll go test that now...