Old Hardware? New Feel

Things to do with older hardware?

I was given an old MacBook Pro 8,2. it had a faulty hard drive and only 4GB ram.

After I upgraded the RAM to 16GB and threw in a 500GB SSD I figured reloading it with Mac OS should be a breeze.

Connected it to my network and did a cloud rebuild.

That’s when I realised how Apple makes so much profit.

Getting High Sierra on it was no problem.

Trying to get it to upgrade to Mojave was a little more difficult, but not impossible.

However trying to get it to do anything useful was harder. Chrome would not install, Teams would not install, Could not install Edge or Microsoft Office. So The upgrade to Mojave was carried out.

Quick search of Google and found a way to get a patched version of Catalina on it.

This crippled it. No hardware graphics acceleration made it feel sluggish.

That’s when I thought…. Linux Mint.

Built myself a bootable USB stick with Linux Mint 20.1 64 bit.

Booted from it to try it in the live environment and was soon hit with the first issue, no WiFi. Easily fixed by enabling the Broadcom Driver.

So I was happy with the live version, no I decided to do an install. Removed MacOs and just had Mint booting.

Got to say I am really happy. the performance is absolutely stunning, graphics are fine, it runs so smoothly. I have the latest Chrome browser installed, I have Teams and Zoom installed and I can use Microsoft 365 in my browser just fine.

The games in Google Stadia run flawlessly as do the ones installed via Steam.

So the lesson here is that just because a huge company like Apple say that your laptop needs to go into the bin, does not mean you have to give them more money.

This laptop will serve me well for a long time to come.