Restoring a 2009 macbook and giving it a new life - part 1

While ago, on my primary laptop the fan got malfunctioned.

It fell apart and the laptop of course would not boot the system, giving me the fan error since the fan was not running.

My primary laptop is a Lenovo Thinkpad. One would think for these laptops, parts, especially the fan, can be found anywhere. Well, it turned out to be complete opposite in my country. I had hard time finding the replacement fan anywhere in my country. 

After couple of days of searching everywhere, i gave up, went on eBay and ordered one for only couple of bucks. On eBay there were thousands of these replacement fans for Lenovo Thinkpads.

While i was hunting for parts, i accidentally ran across this old #macbook. #Macbook A1181 from 2009.

It was selling for only 20 euros or 25 usd and the selling ad noted that it’s completely functioning and working with functional battery and charger. 

I was always quite intrigued with mac technology and with the eco system of mac os X and always wanted to learn more about it but never had the opportunity and since i was in need of a laptop until the replacement fan arrives, this seemed like a perfect opportunity to me.

I also had an idea to give myself a challenge and to use this #macbook as my primary laptop for some time. to see can it still be used by today’s standards.

I bough it and went home to test it. It had on it one stick of 1 GB DDR2 RAM and a 60 GB SATA I HDD, 2.13 Ghz Core2Duo and the notorious Nvidia GeForce 9400M graphics with 256 of shared memory but no mac OS installed on it.

The esthetics of the macbook were awful. It was completely dirty and besides the dirt it has a lot of scratches and a couple of broken pieces and holes on the lower case. So someone really did some numbers on it.

But on my big surprise, the screen is in perfect condition and almost as new.

I cleaned it as best as i could and installed Mac OS 10.7 to test it first to make sure that everything works fine and of course to make sure that i did not get scammed.

Everything on it is working properly, success.

All the ports, the keyboard, the trackpad, the gestures on the trackpad, web camera, optical drive, speakers, the screen, the battery charger and the battery as well. Everything is working great. HDD is in a good condition and installed the Mac OS on the first try, battery when fully charged gives almost 4 hours of juice, which is pretty good actually considering the case, I found myself lucky taking in the factor the Nvidia GPU. They are notorious on these models for getting bad and to break down. The most wow factor for me on this macbook was the screen. Its perfect and still looks good. Very good actually. The image is clear, sharp and crisp, the colors are vivid.

Even though it was working, after installing the Mac OS, i ran across issues. It could not run more than hour. On best, it ran for almost two hours. It was overheating. I feared first it was the GPU. So i wanted to give it the proper treatment. Disassemble it, clean it, replace the thermal paste. Fortunately it did not need thorough cleaning on the inside, just the heat pipe and the vent .

 I am a complete noob for MacBooks. I disassembled and repaired many laptops and PCs but never a macbook. Some may notice noob moves in the video and will give face palms to themselves. This is my first time disassembling a macbook. Nevertheless, i found disassembly guides on internet, studied them and started the procedure very carefully. The procedure was a success but in the process of disassembling the macbook, i managed to cut my finger. That’s a first one.

When i was removing the keyboard from the lower case, one side was really stuck and did not want to separate from the case. I feared. if i used tools, i would damage the keyboard. So. i used my fingers to remove it. One side of the keyboard has a vertical metal edge and i grabbed it. I used a bit much of the force and the finger got cut.

BUT… No overheating and runs fine without any issues. The next step for me was to make it usable to my liking and also upgrade it. It had 60 GB HDD and for today's standard, that’s very low storage and to give it more RAM as well. Luckily i had spare 2 sticks with 2 GB of DDR2 but this model can support up to 6 GB of RAM which is not bad at all and one spare HDD of 750 GB as well. No SSD unfortunately for now.

Also i needed to upgrade the Mac OS as well because i discovered that today many apps, that are used daily, browsers for an example(Chrome, Firefox etc…) do not support Mac OS 10.7 and i needed at least Mac OS 10.9 in order to have those running. Sure, you can find for those apps older versions and have them running but will not receive any new updates and i found this important because i needed this OS upgraded for my programming apps as well. Luckily this macbook supports up to Mac OS El Capitan, which i installed, and El Capitan still receives mandatory updates from #Apple and will support many apps(at least those important for me) for some time. Second reason for OS upgrade is i wanted to test and see can this macbook at least do some light video editing and to export in FULL HD, and it can..

This video right here and the part 2 is edited and rendered by this macbook.

So far so good and pretty satisfied with the work i’ve done taking in the consideration that this is my first encounter with the macbook on this level and i still have it and use it daily.

I do have more plans and ideas what to do with it and i already have come up with a couple new interesting projects. I will also use it as backup laptop for some time. 

Well... so far, challenge goes well...

Thank you very much for your time and stay tuned…