Trying To Get Technology To Last

Over the past year, my 2009 model 15 inch Macbook Pro had been gradually getting slower and slower. I had upgraded it to El Capitan which is the most modern OS that a laptop of this vintage can successfully run. But it was struggling to load things, the coloured spinning wheel of death was becoming a more frequent occurence. Then it got really serious.

A restart would take ten minutes, and the display would just hang until one night it just refused to start up. I had been thinking that maybe this year I would have to bite the bullet and buy a new laptop but the prices were looking very pricy to replace this one with something of similar ilk - something like A$3500 unless I was prepared to look at a Macbook Air or a 13 inch model to drop a $1000 off the RRP. But I really like this laptop - I have looked after it and the big beautiful screen and the clean minimally scratched aluminum body was still in good shape. If it could be rescued in some way....

The other thing was that I hadn't done a backup since February. I am not a technical person at all and hadn't actually used Time Machine for over 12 months when I decided to do a backup onto an external drive because well, it was overdue, and just like servicing a car, it is what a sensible computer user should do ... just in case.

I sought out the technician at school for some advice - someone who knows the inside of computers really well and he said he'd have a look during his lunch break. He confirmed what I was suspecting - the hard drive was dead. But he suggested that I could give my MacBook new life because as I mentioned earlier, the whole laptop was still in good physical condition and apart from an ailing battery and a noisy fan (cured by blowing out 8 years of accumulated lint and dust), everything else still looked in good shape. He recommended that I buy a larger capacity SSD hard drive which he would help me to swap over. I went to a computer parts retailer MSY and got a Crucial 525G SSD for A$195 which doubled my storage and would be superior to old drive by being better than new. The technician got it swapped over and described the process I would need to do to recover and restore the laptop.

I used my old DVD of Snow Leopard to install a fresh OS and then tried to download a fresh install of El Capitan from the Mac App Store. For some reason, I could not get this to work, as the Download button was greyed out but a search through some Mac forums uncovered the issue (which I can't recall right now!) and got me back on the right track. I learned how to boot the Mac into Safe mode, how to format the new SSD drive ready for the new OS, and then finally I managed to bring back all of my files and content from my February Time Machine backup. Any files or changes I had made between February and June were lost but 95% of what I had feared gone (including things as trivial as auto-fill passwords for e-banking) were back! Even my son's YouTube video originals which were dumped when the old 250G hard drive was nearly capacity were there although Josh had no desire to see embarrassing creations from 18 months ago when he thought being a YouTuber was the coolest thing on earth.

The tech at school also suggested that a new battery would be a relatively simple upgrade for me to have a go at. He pointed me to eBay and advised me not to go too high in costs as there might not be much difference in quality when getting a non-genuine but compatible replacement. So for $40, I had a replacement battery sent to me from Sydney (via China probably) and I checked out a couple of how-to YouTube videos before unscrewing the base and disconnecting the old battery and putting the new one. I got a bit confused about how to successfully calibrate the battery - the YouTube videos had one method geared towards the battery they were promoting and the one I had bought had its slightly different process. I was meant to let the battery drain down initially to 2% before charging it back to full as letting it completely drain first up would cause battery life damage according to the enclosed pamphlet. I was watching it carefully but it discharged a bit more rapidly than I anticipated and basically went from 7% to flat without warning! Anyway, I am now just using it as normal now and the battery does not seem to have a particularly long life - maybe around 90 minutes but considering the old battery would barely last 20 minutes off the charger, it is a marginal improvement and certainly I am no worse off for a laptop that I mostly use when kicking back on the couch with easy access to the power cord as required.

I am pretty pleased - for an outlay of less than $240 I have given my MBP a new lease of life and hopefully helped to dodge planned obsolescence for a few more years. I am a bit more confident about backups and re-installs and know that for anything device based there is a solution on the web somewhere that will most probably solve the problem. If I could do this, then it means that almost anyone else could.

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One thought on “Trying To Get Technology To Last

  1. Paul Luke

    G’day Graham – I gave my mid-2010 MBP a new lease of life a few years back with a SSD replacing the optical drive and a RAM upgrade – worked a treat. Earlier this year I succumbed and bought a new 15 inch MBP with Touch Bar – very costly, but love it. Using multiple apps and iCloud services through iPhone, iPad and MBP.
    Cheers, P

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