Tag: macbook

mid-2010 MacBook Refurb And Patching

A nice straightforward refurb I did for a friend of mine, who is also a musician and who wanted a basic MacBook to use as part of his stage rig. This A1342 mid-2010 white unibody MacBook fitted the bill perfectly – once I had fitted a new battery, 8GB of RAM and a 500GB SSD system drive.

A1342 Ready For Some New RAM

Thankfully these are all components which are very easily accessed in these unibody models. And fairly easy to replace, too…

The RAM and the storage are very straightforward. To change the battery you need a Triflite screwdriver, and you need to check under the ‘Do Not Remove’ label attached to the original battery to access a secret ‘hidden’ screw. Still nothing terribly taxing there, though!

I then used the dosdude1 patchers to install macOS 1o.14.6 (‘Mojave’) onto this Mac, as requested.

And there, a new lease of life for a ten-year-old laptop. I am excited to see how this Mac performs onstage now!

mid-2009 MacBook On Mojave

My ‘secondary’ laptop – an A1181 white MacBook from 2009 – only officially supports up to OS X 10.11 (‘El Capitan’).

Using the super-easy, user-friendly patcher tools from dosdude1, I was able to force this machine onto macOS 10.14.6 (‘Mojave’) in line with all the other Macs I am using.

All good on Mojave

Some trackpad functionality has altered a little (I was warned this could happen on these models when I downloaded the patchers) but that’s still very useable. With an SSD now installed as well, the Mac runs impressively smoothly for its age.

Ideally I would like to boost the RAM up from 4GB to 6GB (which is the actual maximum RAM for this model, according to Everymac), but that will require finding a 4GB DDR2 SO-DIMM at a reasonable price, which seems to be almost impossible! Do please let me know if you spot any for sale, if you have any which you are no longer using!