iMac 21.5" mid 2011 CPU Upgrade and Repair

At the end of March while the school semester was still in gear, I managed to come across a particular broken iMac at Purdue Salvage. It had a broken glass screen, no hard drive, no RAM, but it was 2011 and it was only going for $100. Against some better judgement, I decided that buying it and repairing it would be kind of fun since I had never actually taken apart an Apple product and I later confirmed that upgrading components was a possibility.

I don't think you can see it very well, but there's a massive crack in the glass that spans the entirety of the screen. I didn't know this until after I took one of these apart that the glass portion of the screen is actually held on to it by some strong magnets. It was really easy to replace and (compared to buying a new iMac all together) was inexpensive to replace. It kind of makes you wonder why they decided to junk the computer.

Purdue Salvage, or the people that handed over to be tossed, decided that removing the hard drive and RAM would be a smart idea then scrapped the whole unit. So the entire process was sort of concerning because I could not confirm if there were other problems with the iMac itself, but I did the initial test of just starting it up and getting the three long(and really loud) beeps that indicated "RAM IS MISSING OR MAYBE HARDWARE IS NOT ACCEPTABLE"


Initially I wanted to install a SSD into it rather than a HDD because it was already kind of an older unit and came stock with a core i5 processor so it could use the extra speed boost. I figured since I was trying to get it up and running again I would figure out if I could drop an i7 into it while I was taking it apart.

As it happens there are a number of different sites and probably dedicated people that have determined what kinds of processors (and probably other components) that can be swapped out of certain models of Apple computer products. Turns out, theory suggested that a core i7 could replace this model of iMac. I was still kind of hesitant however, because Apple does provide an i7 2600S processor which is a low power version of the processor, but they don't mention anything about the "full" version of the i7 2600 processor. Through my power of sleuthing and the internet I was able to find posts from people that allegedly replaced their processors with the standard core i7 2600 cpu, but no one showed any screenshots of this proving one way or the other. Come on internet, provide proof of these sorts of things. How else could you be trusted?

 This was a pretty good sign. I tried using Other World Computing's HDD to SSD upgrade kit for my model of iMac. Unfortunately, I ran into some different problems. So, you can't use the Snow Leopard disk to install OSX because support for SSD wasn't available. Well that's okay, I have a Macbook Air with El Capitan and created an install USB drive with it. Try again, well, it managed to get past boot up and I was able to get to disk utility, but for some reason or another it managed to fail at the last portion of install. I still haven't determined why. I managed to get a lot of useful information and support from MacSales though. I spoke with someone named Bob Boldt with their sales team, not only is he awesome, but the entire staff that I've seen is incredibly helpful. I would strongly suggest that if you have any mac related issues/projects to check with them. They really do deserve it, credit where credit is due.



As a little side note, the first time I tried to install using the OSX disk, the drive didn't want to return it to me so I had to operate to remove it.




 Anyways, after struggling with the SSD so long, I gave up and decided that I should just use one my left over HDD that I have sitting around with some outdated version of Linux on it. It managed to install El Capitan no problem. Hooray. I wanted to install OSX first before I opened the computer up to do cpu surgery because up to this point I didn't even know if the computer was functional. Now on to the surgery.

 More useful information OWC has on their website, instructional videos (that's a direct vimeo link to the video that I found useful) that step you through installing their SSD. It is a cleverly disguised video that shows you how to install one of their SSD kits, but in reality it shows you how to take out the motherboard so that you can perform serious surgery. Apple did a good job at making everything compact and fit into it's little box, but like anything that is engineered to be compact becomes really difficult to use intuition to take apart. It's a shame they don't provide the information easily to repair their units.

There's the meat of it. Really nice, small, and a funny shaped head. The cpu is under that square bit (the heatsink) there on the right. There's a sticker that says, "warranty void if removed", but I'm not really sure what that means. I suspect it means this screw is the important one. Once you unscrew the four screws(Torx) you get access to the cpu and the rest is like replacing any other cpu in a computer.

Nice! Although, in my opinion they used probably way too much thermal paste on the original cpu, cleaning it up and replacing was pretty simple. Be sure to make sure that you have the orientation correct. I nearly put it in flipped(180 degrees rotated not flipped) until I reviewed some of my photos to double check. Always be thorough. Good advice to anyone for
anything... probably.

There see? Proof. You might have to look closely, but the top of the processor it says core i7 2600. Not 2600S, not core i5, it says i7 2600. It can be done. "But Steve that doesn't prove that it works." I hear you cry.

As I'm typing this post on my newly refurbished iMac, I can definitively say that the iMac 21.5" mid 2011 will accept the core i7 2600 processor and it is definitely not on fire.

I cut out the bit with the serial number. I am not sure if that's useful information to others, but if it is I probably don't want them to have it.

There it is. Core i7 2600 in an iMac that probably isn't supposed to have it in there. I haven't given up completely on the SSD, I'm going to be working on getting the SSD installed again and seeing if I can install OSX on it as the secondary drive. If that's successful, then I can make the HDD the secondary storage drive using the SSD for the main system. I also have been finding information about replacing the graphics card in this unit. Do I need it? Probably not, but I don't see why it wouldn't help or be a bad idea. This is now my little Frankintosh... ugh, that's a way better name than calling it Rorschach... why did I think of this now?

This was kind of fun, so if I figure out more information on a graphics card upgrade/replacement, I may make another blog post about it. I'll edit this post once I can get the SSD installed properly the way I want it to be. What did I learn from this? I learned that the cpu fan likes to be on all the time now and it is super loud, but that's okay because I have headphones for this sort of thing.

Replacing LG VK810 Digitizer on a Tablet

I have been meaning to post more stuff. Things have gotten... well I don't want to say busy, but I have certainly found myself doing less student/project related things now that it's summer time and all the students are gone. I am looking forward to the fall semester.

Anyways, recently my granddad's tablet's screen broke. I would have liked to just replace the glass because I have seen the method that's commonly used to replace glass on phones and would have liked to give that a go, but instead my granddad purchased the whole digitizer and glass assembly. I did try to find the glass alone, but I wasn't able to find anything. So I offered to take it apart and see if I could figure out how to get the thing replaced and back together.

I should have taken a picture of the tablet broken, but I assure this was sufficiently broken. I tried to stay fairly thorough. I was kind of a little frustrated with how much glass there was and how days after I still found glass splinters in my hands. If you're reading this and you have anything that is glass that doesn't have some kind of screen protector on it order one for it now. Glass plates, glass mugs, glass armor. Doesn't matter what it is, having that adhesive clear protector on it would have limited my glass splinter levels down. Anyways, to the breakdown.

The hardest part was getting the back plastic case off the electronics portion of the tablet. The entire plastic bottom case is a solid piece and you can't slide or unlock something to get it apart. Which you just pretty much try to apply a wide surface area of pressure and pry it out. (I used a screw driver and some cursing to do the trick.)

Once it's apart, things at least made sense looking at how to. We have a ribbon thing, a battery thing, a printed circuit board thing, and an aluminum tape thing. It was kind of frustrating that I couldn't find any advice on how to take apart this specific model of the LG tablet. I did find other models and other tablets so from a combining what people on the internet said and what I could see I managed to start taking things by pieces.

Keep in mind, I deconstructed the entire tablet. I needed to remove the old digitizer and clean the old broken glass from the plastic chassis. I started with the removed the pcb so I could remove the ribbon cable so I could get the battery out. So after unscrewing everything and then double checking to make sure I didn't miss screws I did find that the manufacturers were not shy about using adhesive to keep everything together. If you're removing things and feel it's stuck then it probably is and you just need to lightly apply pressure and wait for it to come unstuck.

Because I'm replacing the digitizer assembly, everything needs to come out. Camera, speaker, plastic housing bits, secret connector bits, and even some of the tape that was used as, what I'm guessing to be, insulation.

Once I got one side of the ribbon cable free, I needed to work on the other side of the ribbon cable would goes to the USB connector and what looked to be sound/microphone pcb. Again this was moving things out of the way once they were unscrewed and keeping special looking tape and just overall being gentle with the connectors.

Once the ribbon cable was free so I could remove the battery, getting the rest of the bits out of their holes and crevices was a lot more simple and I was able to see the back of the old digitizer.

Removing the old digitizer from the plastic chassis, which you can see underneath with all the broken glass, required a heat gun, patience, and time. It wasn't necessarily important to be slow to preserve the old digitizer so much as I needed to keep the plastic chassis in tact without melting it with the heat gun. Similarly, I used the heat gun and a flat head screwdriver to remove the old adhesive and broken glass from the chassis as well.

 This is the cleaned chassis next to the new digitizer assembly. Now that's left is to reverse the process and put it all together. I only encountered two different types of screws that were distinctly different so I didn't have an issue as long as I used the right screw, but I also tried to keep the correct screw with it's corresponding hole on a piece of paper so I didn't muck everything up. Attaching the new digitizer to the plastic chassis, I used UV curing tape that for some reason we had on hand in the instrument shop. Allegedly it's pretty cheap, but it was convenient because we also had a UV bath (it looks like a cheap nail salon UV bath) to help the curing process.

Once everything was back together, it turned on and nothing smoked out of the headphone jack. It was interesting, but really I don't think I want to do that again. I do not particularly like working with broken glass.