Have you ever looked on eBay for a MacBook and noticed how there are many older MacBooks are still selling for a decent amount? Have you ever wondered why this is? Well, we believe part of the reason is just how long MacBooks last. We have a MacBook from 2008 that is still chugging along, as well as our most recent project, a mid-2009 MacBook Pro.
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When we received this laptop, it was unclear whether or not it worked and a quick visual inspection lead us to believe that it may not. You can see the dents and bends in the pictures below if you don't believe us.
So, to begin, we did a quick power on test. With the device plugged in, we nervously pressed the power button and crossed our fingers. Much to our delight, it sprang to life with the famous Apple boot noise. We then preceded to boot into a dated Mac OS X 10.6.8 and the screen flickered for a while.
This flickering soon filtered out and we were soon pin-wheeling into the future. Finally, tried of watching the pin-wheel, we decided to take a deeper dive into what may be making the laptop take so long to load even the desktop. So, we ripped out our Kali Linux USB drive and booted to it.
Once getting into Kali Linux, we noticed an immediate improvement and the desktop loaded relatively quickly. We decided that the hard drive needed to be checked. After running a few tests on the drive we saw in red "self-test failed". This meant that the original hard drive was holding the entire computer back.
Once getting into Kali Linux, we noticed an immediate improvement and the desktop loaded relatively quickly. We decided that the hard drive needed to be checked. After running a few tests on the drive we saw in red "self-test failed". This meant that the original hard drive was holding the entire computer back.
Now that we knew that the problem was the hard drive, we ordered a 240GB Kingston A400 SSD, which is our go to brand for 2.5" storage. Here at iTech News, all but our MacBook Air utilizes Kinston SSDs and we could not be happier! Not only are these reliable, they also have amazing build quality and a really good price compared to other options on the market. If you need any 2.5" drive we recommend going for a SSD especially on maCOS, specifically, we recommend going for Kingston SSD drives as they have the best build quality out of all the SSDs we've used.
Once we got the drive and put it into the computer, we had to find out how to do a fresh install of macOS onto the drive (yes, we know we can't get the latest version, but anything above Mac OS X 10.9 we good enough for us). |
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We settled for OS X 10.11 El Capitan, giving compatibility with most apps that we would use on the everyday.