What have you done with an early Intel recently?

[DCBassman]

Well, it lives, at least partly. One RAM slot seems to be faulty. The keyboard doesn't work at all. Up to this point, it fires up as soon as the power is applied. Have stuck in a 250GB 7200 spinner for now, and installing High Sierra. Display is good. Wifi seems to work. Battery shows 100%, so I'm going to be pessimistic and assume that's MacBook-speak for 'dead'. Gets quite warm at one end, pretty much from the get-go,

 

[ToniCH]

Well, it lives, at least partly. One RAM slot seems to be faulty. The keyboard doesn't work at all.

On my early 2011 one RAM slot is also faulty (and GPU broken), my late 2011 is problem free this far. I hear problematic RAM slots are not rare. And all MBP 2011 Radeon GPUs break on sooner or later.

Keyboard: does the touch pad work? Look at the logic board very closely, check that every single cable is connected properly. Be careful, some of the connectors are fragile. Look at iFixit and youtube to see how each connector is opened and closed. Some are not self evident.

Attach an external keyboard and clear the PRAM 3 times (3 chimes) and see if it starts to behave more normally. Note that if it has some software trickery to disable the dGPU (common if its broken) then this can/will also clear that and could cause no boot -situation. Then you need to study how to reapply them. I can point you to some good sites and threads about it if that happens. Hopefully its still operational.

Battery shows 100%, so I'm going to be pessimistic and assume that's MacBook-speak for 'dead'.

Install Coconut battery and see what it says about your battery.

 

[DCBassman]

The only thing I've been able to do that I'm certain of is clear the PRAM. Nothing else has changed.After a random time, the machine enters sleep mode, then will come out of it by pressing enter. The fan nearest the DC input is pushing out warm air immediately, and I wonder if that's due to the charging circuitry struggling with a dead battery.
The trackpad seems to work.

 

[DCBassman]

Seems to run a bit cooler with the battery disconnected. Will see if I can get further with an install.

 

[eyoungren]

Was thinking of bringing the garage Macs up today. Went out to the garage and spent about five mins. moving some stuff around. Still too hot to be out there comfortably working with the Macs - so will wait another few weeks.

Did bring up the 2008 MBP out there though. First backup in a couple months and updating files on Dropbox…

 

[ToniCH]

Seems to run a bit cooler with the battery disconnected. Will see if I can get further with an install.

How are you doing the install? Bootable usb drive or internet recovery?

 

[DCBassman]

USB drive. Not managing with the HDD, preparing an SSD, can keep it awake without the battery. Doesn't remember date/time. Happily running a live Mint session while waiting for the drive. Trying to use the System Information to see if anything looks wrong, but all appears present and correct. I'm going to assume that a bad GPU will not show up as faulty?
Both keyboard and trackpad show on the list also.

 

[DCBassman]

Mint controlling brightness fine. Has a slider for keyboard backlight, but that's also not working. I guess that might be a connector off, if both are not working.

 

[DCBassman]

(Macbook Pro 8,2)
Last thing before I gave up for the night: close checks revealed both keyboard and back-light disconnected. No luck yet in changing that. More later.

 

[ToniCH]

USB drive. Not managing with the HDD, preparing an SSD, can keep it awake without the battery. Doesn't remember date/time. Happily running a live Mint session while waiting for the drive. Trying to use the System Information to see if anything looks wrong, but all appears present and correct. I'm going to assume that a bad GPU will not show up as faulty?

Yes, I think you cannot see the bad GPU in system info. But, you will see it when booting. If the screen is filled with horizontal stripes then its bad. Its weird color too. If it boots and looks fine then its probably ok.

You could explore these options too for OS installation: https://eshop.macsales.com/blog/41010-mac-os-101-how-to-boot-and-use-a-mac-in-target-disk-mode/

Last thing before I gave up for the night: close checks revealed both keyboard and back-light disconnected.

That sounds like good news. Double check how the connectors in question work before redoing them. Cannot remember what kind they are but when I was doing the case swap to my MBP 17" there was couple of connectors I could have screwed up without seeing a video first.

 

[ToniCH]

Yesterday I installed the 10.6 Server OS to my Late 2009 iMac Server. Found an external Superdrive but had some difficulty to get it to accept the installation disk. Finally it did and all was fine. After playing with the OS I find it overly complicated vs. normal OS for the simple job I want it to do (light home file server for 2). And it takes the same RAM as 10.11. So, I think I will go with the normal OS. Any suggestions on version, 10.11 or something earlier for this simple job? The server has 4GB RAM and a SSD.

I also dug out my old 2007 iMac and booted it up for the first time maybe in 7+ years. Still works and even calendar was on correct day, only the clock was 2hrs off. It still has the 10.6.8 which it had when my wife was running it years ago. I bought it new and ran it until I bought my first late 2009 iMac 27". Even installed a 128GB SSD to it while it was my office machine.

 

[DCBassman]

Yes, I think you cannot see the bad GPU in system info. But, you will see it when booting. If the screen is filled with horizontal stripes then its bad. Its weird color too. If it boots and looks fine then its probably ok.

In that case, it's looking good.

 

[ToniCH]

So, I think I will go with the normal OS. Any suggestions on version, 10.11 or something earlier for this simple job? The server has 4GB RAM and a SSD.

I installed both Snow Leopard and el Capitan to their respective partitions and configured file and screen sharing.

For some reason connecting from my iMac with High Sierra was very slow to el Capitan shared folders and I didn't get the screen sharing to connect (no errors, I just got bored waiting after few minutes). With Snow Leopard the connection happened instantly on both shared folders and screen sharing. I will test it further tomorrow, todays tests were over Minis slow wifi (far away from the router so TX-speed was super slow) but the server will IRL be connected over ethernet so I expect better actual performance.

Also bought a license to DriveDx, I usually test the drives in my cMP and was running into the trial period expiration too often, so I made the purchase. I have noticed that I use it quite often now so worth the money IMHO.

 

[ToniCH]

I connected the Mini Server 09 with Snow Leopard to my network with ethernet and now its super smooth. File transfers are only 100T ethernet but for photos, books etc. its quite enough. Tried to force it to 1000T ethernet but for some reason it didn't work.

I just copied a 2.15GB RIP of a DVD-movie into the 09-servers 1TB spinner disk and played it over the network (file on server, VLC-player on my iMac) with perfect results. 😎

EDIT: just noticed that I forgot to install Apple updates after the basic OS install. Will do it now. EDIT2. done and its 10.6.8 now.

Here is screen sharing screenshot on both Mac Mini Servers in my network as seen on my iMac screen at this moment.

 

[DCBassman]

Macbook Pro 8,2: keyboard and backlight now working. Installing High Sierra on a 128GB SSD, and so far, so good. Remaining problems: need a new battery. Need to figure out why the power button does nothing. Might that be connected to the dead battery? Don't see why it should be, but who knows...

 

[DCBassman]

Having received the proper drive screws and a screwset for the bottom cover, I shuffled components and found a 240GB Crucial SSD and installed it. Put the High Sierra SSD in an external caddy and restored the new drive from it. All good. Bar the battery, I have a working MBP for £20 plus screws and charger.

 

[DCBassman]

MacBook Pro 8,2 progress: all well except one RAM slot and now the camera has gone AWOL. It definitely was working. Then, just the green LED. Now, nothing at all and it has vanished from the System Report. The connector is definitely connected, and appears undamaged. Not that I ever use the damned things, maybe half a dozen times during Zoom calls to family during the pandemic. So it's hardly a show-stopper. But irritating, you know?

 

[eyoungren]

Decided I didn't feel like waiting much longer. Temps will dip into the mid-80s in a week anyway, so here we are.

Again, Early and Late 2009 Mac Minis…and 15" MacBook Pro (connected to BaseJump).



Real PITA this time around getting both Macs to repair with their keyboards and trackpad/mouse.

 

[eyoungren]

Work done on 2009 MacPro, Photoshop CC21.

Decided the background of the E:09 Mini on the right side was a little disjointed. I like the Starbucks background as a cafe look and Julie London (on the left) was a torch singer in lounges (and an actress), so that stays.

Just needed someone on the right…



Susan Egan, Broadway actress. But most importantly, the voice of Meg from Hercules.

EDIT, this is a spanned image. One half is for a left monitor and the other for a right monitor. Both equal resolution.

 

[DCBassman]

Next task for an Early Intel Mac: SSD upgrade for the 2008 iMac 8,1. Have ordered a suitable bracket for the drive. This can be dispensed with in the 2009-2011 machines, with a bit of messing around, but I did put one in the 2011. The 2009 has my own, erm, solution! But with the spring clip mount in these, I see no option but to have a converter caddy, in order to remount after upgrade. No apparent sensor issues, unstick it from old drive, restick it to the new one. Unless I'm missing something obvious? Certainly won't be long until I find out...

 

[mectojic]

Today I updated my Mac Mini 3,1 (early 2009) to High Sierra, installed OBS, and used it to stream my Quail livestream, whose video feed comes from USB 1.1 webcam on a Power Mac G3 B&W.
That would be the oldest Mac Mini capable of running High Sierra, getting video feed from the oldest Mac with built-in USB and video-output functionality.

Photo below shows the moment one of them laid an egg on stream!

 

[DCBassman]

Daily driver setup is now the mid-2011 iMac 21.5" running Monterey. Will wait with interest and see if OCLP can help it upgrade to Sonoma, as Software Update keeps urging me to do. So my Windows machine is further demoted toward the junk pile. Never thought I'd see *that* day...

 

[TheShortTimer]

Never thought I'd see *that* day...

Same here. My first Mac was purchased as a low-cost means of testing the waters and it existed for quite a time alongside my Windows desktops and laptops. I now use Macs almost exclusively for my computing tasks.

 

[eyoungren]

Indesign and Photoshop 2021 work (2009 MacPro) for new wallpaper on my Late '09 Mini.

This is the combined image, will export as separate images to left and right monitor. White point in between the two text blocks is the middle. Both text blocks have the exact same amount of letter.

This is the 'Creativity Desktop', for inspiration of creativity when using this Mac Mini.

Will show the wallpaper shortly…



EDIT: And there we are…

 

[ToniCH]

Daily driver setup is now the mid-2011 iMac 21.5" running Monterey. Will wait with interest and see if OCLP can help it upgrade to Sonoma, as Software Update keeps urging me to do. So my Windows machine is further demoted toward the junk pile. Never thought I'd see *that* day...

If I were you I would use the Monterey for a month or more to get a good feeling how it all really works on your machine, before updating it further. If you go to Sonoma right away and it doesn't work to your satisfaction and you decide to downgrade you don't know if Monterey works either.

BTW. how does Monterey work with the 2011 stock (non Metal supported) GPU in your experience this far? Do wifi and BT work ok?