Is my 2017 iMac just getting old?

Tech Support
21

Back it up now. You may not be able to even now if there are disk errors.

22

Just reporting back to say that my iMac is now running off a Samsung T7 SSD. This was the first time in using a Mac for more than twenty-five years that I had had a failing hard drive—hence the elementary questions. Thank you to everyone who provided advice.

I had hoped that the problem with an annoying popup window asking where the Notification Centre is would disappear with the fresh installation, but it hasn’t. In addition, I have the Dock set to automatically hide and show, but recently it had been showing at startup, and this behaviour has also persisted.

3 Likes
23

Yes, it is sometimes real magic, what kind of failures you could carry on, even with a more or less clean installation.
I have some annoying issues with my Apple Mail I carry now since somewhere in 2020 (IIRC), that was caused by an add-on, and unfortunately stayed even after the complete removal of the add-on, and several reinstallation’s of the system since then.

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My iMac had been happily running off a Samsung T7 SSD for the past eight months or so, but a few days ago typing started to become excruciatingly slow—the same key often needs to be pressed several times to get a response, and even then letters sometimes get swallowed. I have rebooted several times and also checked the SSD with DriveDX, which indicated no problems. I have also tried using a different keyboard. I am wondering whether there comes a time when even an external SSD cannot keep an ailing iMac alive. (I am typing this on an old MacBook Pro running Catalina.)

25

Could it be a USB cable issue?

1 Like
26

Do you mean the keyboard’s cable? I have tried using a different keyboard, but that made no difference.

27

Yes, the keyboard cable, assuming it’s not hard wired.

If you use a different User account, does it still happen?

1 Like
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Hmm, typing seems to be normal when logging in with a different user account. I should have thought of testing that sooner. Now I just need to figure out what might have caused this problem in the last few days.

1 Like