My wife has an old Macbook laptop, old being the keyword here. It powers ON, and almost everything works fine, except the battery, which is completely dead thus it works directly on mains power. To see if it can have any practical usage in the current time, I tried accessing Internet through the Safari and tried updating it but neither happened. Posting below the phone pics clicked of the system’s config and error messages. Please let me know if it can be brought up to the code of some degree of usability and if so then how. Attaching the pics below.
Usecase is nothing specific, just want it to be usable enough in terms of basic web browsing, Whatsapp and PDF viewing, document editing, and be as updated as possible for the device to be.
1 GB RAM is way too low for Win 7. Add the ever expanding list of unsupported software and end of security patches to the equation. It’s going to be a painful experience.
I highly recommend that OP install one of the following 32 bit Linux OSes.
Okay what’s the max amount of RAM that this particular Macbook supports?
Also, is that Core 2 Duo 64 bit capable? The Mac OS installed atm is 32 bit if I am not wrong.
In any case, I still recommend Linux since his use case is simple web browsing, PDF viewing and doc editing. With Windows they might need an antivirus.
If it works on a G5 , no reason it won’t work on a C2D.
SATA is SATA.
TRIM support is questionable on an older OS though.
@@LaatSahab
If you’ve got an old SATA SSD lying around , it’ll make a big difference to the responsiveness even on such an old machine compared to running it off an HDD.
C2D with an SSD would be more than “acceptable” experience. Only problem will be youtube.
Lack of hardware decoding support will load the CPU too much and videos will stutter badly.
It’s not worth it. Test it by trying youtube videos first if you can. A chrome extension called enhanced-x264ify might help in disabling some non-supported codecs and restoring x264 playback.
I was hoping to have just the software upgraded for it to be usable but going by the discussions it seems the hardware also needs upgrading to bring it up to the code. If that’s the case then I would keep it for a hobby project to be taken up at a later date.
You know what? There is no need to touch your Macbook internals.
Just flash MX Linux as Persistent to a pendrive. 64 GB would be great but 32 GB also works fine if I am not wrong. Hell, I have tried it on my 8GB pendrive even.
A persistent USB install means the Live USB can act as a full blown OS installed to your system. All your sessions are saved on every shut down so you can always boot straight to your USB and work on your Mac. No need to go through all aforementioned hassles.
Well, 32 bit support is one of the major pros but not the only.
MX Linux comes with a lot of handy tools out of the box. You’d understand once you try it. There us GUI for everything and you barely ever need to use the terminal. Can feel great for newbies.
MX Linux is built on top of Debian stable base unlike XUbuntu which is based on Ubuntu Stable. This means there is no Snap trouble to deal with. Snap is the last thing you want on a persistent install. I personally avoid Snap at all costs.
MX Linux software manager is a joy to use.
OP does not really wish to go through the hassle of upgrading his internals. As for 64 bit support, yes, it does support 64 but not without issues, if I am not wrong.
That’s not due to the lack of x64 support by the CPU, but rather apple using 32bit efi bootloader. C2D is very much a 64bit capable cpu, I ran one for years on windows/linux flavors.
The apple 32bit limitation can be circumvented by using a 3rd party bootloader, like rEFInd with EFI stub boot of newer linux kernels.
Whether it should be done is a question left to the OP, but it probably can be done.
