Another upgrade to Mountain Lion question.

Hi! I'm a newbe who got here trying to research this upgrade. I am NOT a power-user and work on the old theory that if it ain't broke, don't fix it, so I'm wondering if I should bother.

Took my iMac [>3 yrs old, 10.5.8] to the local Mac shop [independent dealer, not Mac] because they said they could do it at a fair price. $60 bought me a "full diagnostics" [expensive scan disc!] to see if it could work and they said there were bad sectors on the HD. $500 got me a new HD, $300 upgraded RAM, then there was the cost of the instillation. No thanks.

I got no print out from the scan disc so want to do that myself. How? I remember the bad old days when even new HDs had bad sectors. Do they still? How many bad sectors is "too many"?

That's a start. That's for your patience, Thommo

$300 to upgrade the RAM?????????? Don't walk, RUN from that place!

To scan your drive for bad sectors, really the best software for this is TechTool Pro. But it's not cheap. What you can do instead is do a SMART test using the "long" option. These will have the drive run self-diagnostics and report back on its findings. I use and like SMART Utility, but another good one is SMART Reporter.

Again... just to emphasize... you do the "long" test, not the short one. Onyx and other similar tools do not do the long test.

Shop elsewhere Thommo.