It's not that horrible to replace the CPU in one of those iMacs. The thing to be careful with is not to bend the heat pipes on the heatsink. I think on most if not all models you can disassembled the finned part and that will eliminate the possibility of that happening. I've always just been too lazy and never did that. It's a shame you aren't local because I have a lot of 1.83-2.16ghz Core2Duo Socket M processors.