#hardwaregore — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #hardwaregore, aggregated by home.social.
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what have we here? that's a tar-covered "dead" #Macbook Pro 15 2011 I got for next to nothing. although ancient, the quad-core i7 still can be used for a plethora of activities; they take up to 16 GB DDR3 and can run two SATA drives, with disabled Radeon graphics they are fine #Linux machines.
the stank is... otherworldly, this dude is due for a thorough clean and repaste. before that though we need to make it run, which is hella hard without 85 W Magsafe 1 (ain't got it) and an original A1382 battery (guess what?)
what we do have is a battery from the previous 2009/10 vintage, the A1321. they are electrically compatible but the polarity is inverted, because Apple. so what youse beholding is my #hardwaregore solder job that patched the old battery to fit the new model. fanspin, screen lights up and there's the chime - goody gumdrops!
my old trick with temporary extracting the magsafe connector works, we can now utilise a Magsafe 2 charger until the thing is at least somewhat charged. later on, a 60 W charger will suffice.
the battery is in spectacular condition and it gave me zero problems. the almost 7000 mAh capacity took ages to charge using a non-adequate 60 W charger, need to check if everything is cool with my solderings just in case, maybe that makes it slower?
got a dead Hi-Res model of the same vintage. thought about transplanting just the matte screen, but since the gunky mobo is coming out anyway for cleaning, why not transplant the board into a *cleaner* case. so, that's what's happening!
also got a localized dead keyboard I'm gonna use to transplant some keycaps over, had about enough of the weird layouts from all over. unclipping em is hella finicky but usually works. and if it don't - plenty of replacement keys.
this has got to be the last 2011 with functioning Radeon graphics. it's so old it still has the ATI logo and as such is a nightmare to run in linux, with constant glitches and other issues in a modern wayland install. so, disabling it (kills video out) makes the laptop use the still adequate Intel HD 3000 graphics with way less power consumption and heat.
final addition should be 2x 8 GB DDR3 RAM modules and a 500 GB SSD SATA drive, but those aren't cheap, would cost me about $70 best case scenario and the whole thing's worth like $100 total, if that. so I'll keep a lookout for some swap opportunities for PC components I got #dumpsterdiving.