I Swapped the Hard Drive in My 2009 27" iMac with a SSD

The 512GB Crucial M4I have to admit to being a little scared at first. I'd never taken an iMac apart before and I couldn't afford to replace it if I messed up. The lure of speed was just too great and SSD prices have finally eroded to a price I wanted to spend.

The task isn't easy or straightforward and I recommend doing your homework before pulling the glass off the front of your iMac, but the reward is worth it.

In short, everything went perfectly and my 2009 iMac is running like a scalded dog. If you don't boot from a SSD, you're wasting time! Get all the details here.

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Why Won't My Mac Go To Sleep?

For some reason I've always had trouble getting my 27" iMac to sleep when it was supposed to. I spent a lot of time searching forums and trying a dozen or so different things offered up by users and Apple alike. A few times I found something that seemed to work, only to find my Mac awake again in the middle of the night. It turns out there are literally hundreds of things capable of rendering your Mac a total insomniac. Everything from Bluetooth connections to wonky external hard drives can be the culprit. The process of elimination can take forever. How do you shorten the list without trying everything one at a time? Well, thanks to a post at Macworld, I learned once again that the command line would come to my rescue. This simple command:

pmset -g assertions

will result in a list of processes "asserting" themselves on OS X. Something like this...

 

...showing the number of processes doing things to your system. The two concerning system sleep prevention are PreventSystemSleep and PreventUserIdleSystemSleep. If either of these have a process count greater than zero then you need to look further to find out what they are. The command results go on to list (in order) specific processes assocoated with non-zero values in the above list...

As you can see, the AppleFileServer process was the culprit in my case. Obviously, some other machine on my network was connected to a share on my iMac, preventing it from snoozing. If your case is not so obvious, you can lookup the pid (process identification) in Activity Monitor (in this example, pid 666) to see if you can glean more information. Activity Monitor lets you sort active processes by pid, making things easy to find and even easier to quit. 

Find Out Who's Connected to Your iTunes Library

Have you ever tried to quit iTunes and gotten the warning message: "others are connected to your iTunes library...", going on to say that quitting will disconnect whoever it is using your media? If you're like me and have a house full of Apple gear using HomeSharing, you never know which AppleTV is streaming a movie or who's iPhone is jamming to one of your playlists.  Common courtesy dictates at least checking what's going on. There are a couple of ways to do this. One is screaming at the top of your lungs, "WHO'S STREAMING FROM MY IMAC??!!!"  The other is much more civil and certainly less invasive to your neighbors...

...from the Terminal prompt, type: 

lsof |grep iTunes |grep TCP

...and your results should look something like this:

iTunes    8258  joe   23u    IPv4 0xd862114a55e74e55       0t0      TCP *:daap (LISTEN)

iTunes    8258  joe   24u    IPv6 0xd862114a3499b6e5       0t0      TCP *:daap (LISTEN)

iTunes    8258  joe   49u    IPv4 0xd862114a4fa01cc5       0t0      TCP 192.168.1.114:daap->192.168.1.107:62788 (ESTABLISHED)

Now, you will need to know your user's IP address, but that shouldn't be a problem for anyone who reads the "GEARHEAD" page of MacTexan!