repair

There are 3 posts tagged repair (this is page 1 of 1).

Should I repair an old Macbook Pro?

I’m thinking about fixing an old computer. It’s a 2009 MacBook Pro.

It needs a new hard drive. A replacement for the original 320 GB drive costs $30 but I’d love an SSD for $100 or more.

It needs a new battery. Those will cost another $100.

And it probably warrants a RAM upgrade as well. That will cost about $75.

And why not replace the Superdrive with a second hard drive, like a 2 TB drive that costs $85? But it would also require a caddy for the hard drive at about $35. (Or this other caddy at just $25? Without more study, I’m not sure what the difference is. Update: the difference is a $10 “fix kit” with various tools and parts. Also, they say there’s a limit of 750 GB capacity for the second drive.)

I could probably shave off some of that buying the RAM on eBay or whatever, but barring some real bargains, the minimum to get it running is $30+100=$130. The “wish list” adds another $75+85+35 = $195, assuming my labor and tools are free. Plus S+H, of course.

Speaking of which, the old computer isn’t here. It’s in Michigan, and getting it here will cost $60–90, depending on the breaks.

Sigh. This is why I’m thinking about it.

To be fair, it would be a pretty fair computer when I’m done. Unlike recent Macs, it will have expansion ports. But it won’t run High Sierra. Not sure if that’s a bug or a feature.

The best competitor for it available today is the Macbook Air. That’s getting long in the tooth and will probably be eliminated or turned into something much less attractive, like the Macbook. But right now, it has 8 GB and an SSD to start, and 2 USB3 ports and a Thunderbolt 2 port. It weighs 3 lbs. vs. the MBP’s 5, and has slightly better screen resolution. But it costs $999 and up. A Macbook Pro starts at $1299 and has only two Thunderbolt (3) ports, and lacks a separate power socket and SDHC slot; in fact its only real advantage is more screen resolution.

If only Apple would make a MacBook Pro in 2018 as good as the 2009 one was. But that’s an non-starter, since it would require Apple not to suck.

UPDATE: Consider using an SD card instead of a replacing the SuperDrive with a high-capacity hard drive. According to Apple, the MacBook Pro’s card slot supports major SD formats: SD (2 GB max. cap.), SDHC (32 GB), and SDXC (2 TB). It’s a USB device, so it would be a lot slower than a real SSD, but for bulky items that change rarely it should be adequate.

iMac Salvaged!

Mostly I’ve been blogging about my adventures in Linux-land. But I wanted to write a bit about my other project. About 9 1/2 years ago, we got an iMac, and about four years ago we replaced it with a Mac Mini.

The iMac was a mid-2007 20″ model. (This was the first Aluminum and Glass version, replacing the earlier white plastic models. You can watch Steve Jobs introduce the Aluminum Series on YouTube.)  The specs were: 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo, 250 GB SATA, SuperDrive, and 1 GB of DDR2. It cost $1,220. The late 2012 Mac Mini that replaced it had a 2.5GHz Core i5, 500 MB SATA/5400, 8 GB DDR3) and cost $669, but we had to buy a monitor for it (a Samsung S23C570, which probably cost around $200). So the Mac Mini was definitely an upgrade.

But that wasn’t why we upgraded. It was because the iMac was barely working. The hard drive would go “tick tick tick” for the first hour or two whenever you started running it. The SuperDrive had quit working a couple of years earlier. (Technically, a DVD got stuck in it and could not be removed.) Plus the usual “I’m an old Mac so sometimes I just take forever to do things” that we’re all used to. We finally upgraded because we couldn’t trust that it would work any more.

So. Fast forward four years. I got tired of tripping over the iMac, but I couldn’t bear the thought of losing such a pretty computer. So …I fixed it. Or maybe I threw good money after bad and wasted my time fixing a ten-year old computer. Or both.

I watched a ton of how-to videos (this one was particularly helpful) and read the instructions over and over again. Oh, and before I did that, I got a set of tools from iFixit and parts from OWC (MacSales). Then, after putting it off all during Lent, I ran out of excuses after Easter. So I spent last Friday replacing the original 250 GB hard drive with a 2 GB drive and the SuperDrive with a 2.5″ 1 GB drive. Here’s what it looks like on the inside with the new drives.

iMac 20" (2007 model)

See more pictures of the work in progress on Flickr.

I will say that Apple sure doesn’t want you to make a bootable OS install disk. In spite of all the instructions they provide (here, here, and here). I own three Macs, but ((Shift+) Option+) Command+R doesn’t work on any of them. I finally dug up an old Snow Leopard install DVD and then upgraded to El Cap the slow and painful way.

Ten Years

Ten years ago this month, I quit my job in order to go to seminary. Here’s what I used to work on:

Hardware

My job was to figure out how to avoid paying to fix them when they weren’t broken.