Early 2008 MacBook

Posted on by
1

I recently bought a used early 2008 MacBook. It is in decent shape, has a couple small bits of plastic around the palm rest and one one side of the LCD missing. Battery life was so-so with it. I Decided to go ahead and buy a new battery and now it gets 4 to 5 hours of battery life. Installed OSX Lion on it as well, put a 500GB Hard drive in it. Also was given a free wireless Mighty Mouse to go along with it.

I decided to check out the situation of the thermal paste as I noticed that it tended to run a tad bit hot and the fan kicked in quite often. Upon removal of the CPU heatsink, I noticed that there was basically no thermal paste left. I went ahead and cleaned the CPU off and applied a fresh coat of Arctic Silver 5 to it. It doesn’t heat up as much as it did. Glad that I did that when I did because I imagine I just helped give the MacBook more of a lifespan.

Adventures with Mac Mini

Posted on by
1

After so many failed and successful attempts at running a Hackintosh, I decided to finally just go and get a Mac. I bought the new mid 2011 model Mac Mini.  First thing I did was upgrade the ram from 2GB to 8GB. I did try to run it with the 2GB but it felt very sluggish quite slow. The extra 6GB of ram actually does make a difference.

Another thing I noticed was the lack of a optical drive. Now I have an old IDE DVD burner in an external enclosure but I decided to buy a MacBook Air SuperDrive because it was small and portable and matches the Mini quite nicely. Not to mention my older drive was huge and clunky and annoying to setup.

The next step I took was to buy an external hard drive so I could add more storage to the Mac Mini. I noticed there was a second hard drive connection on the Logic Board of the Mini but there’s no way at the moment of getting a cable that will connect to it. I will in the future install a SSD once I can obtain a cable.

My only annoyance so far with my Mini is the lack of a dedicated GPU. Meaning it’s running the Intel graphics which we all know is not meant for gaming. However it’s a Mac and I really do not expect to really game that much on it except for casual games. I mean flash games and Minecraft run really well on the Mini so far. I will attempt to install Starcraft II on this once I get my desk situated.

I think I might want to get an offical Mac keyboard and mouse for the mini someday as well. Right now I am using an Wireless Illuminated Keyboard and Performance Mouse MX. Both work quite well with OSX.

So far I really like OSX Lion and my Mac Mini, and I do not regret my purchase.