2009 White Macbook worth fixing?

kirbyrj

kirbyrj

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I recently "inherited" my father's old white Macbook (non unibody) when he got a Thinkpad. It's the last one that's still upgradeable to 10.11 since it has the Nvidia 9400 graphics in it. It's a Core 2 Duo @ 2.0Ghz. MB881LL/A Early 2009 is the designator.

Is it worth upgrading to a SSD, maxing out the memory, and replacing the battery (all of those should cost me around $100)? Or is it too old to be "useful" ? It's in pretty good condition all things considered since I remember a lot of those keyboards would crack at the palm rests. I put 10.11 on it, but it seems to take forever to load and is laggy. Would a SSD help that or is the macbook just too old?
 
What is the use case? My sister has a similar machine and it does fine for light home duty.
 
All of those things make that machine rival most modern computers, SSD's help tremendously with every aspect of the machine, you will need to forcibly enable trim on the third party SSD or just live with whatever brands garbage collection algorithm.
 
It won't ever be mega fast by any means, but upgrading it should allow you to do a fairly large myriad of tasks. If you don't already have a laptop and you don't have to do anything super graphics intensive while on the road, it should be more than sufficient.
 
Yeah it depends, I still use an old Mac Mini C2D as a media server and light usage. It's no speed demon anymore, but it can handle those duties fine and quietly.
 
For light/basic use, it should be fine. The SSD will help alot. You might have to deal with the TRIM settings on an older hardware system like that, but I'm not 100% sure.

For a decent laptop that cost nothing and can be upgraded for less that $100... I think it's worth the risk! Worst case, you can sell the parts and sell the laptop off if it doesn't suit your needs down the road.
 
Can someone speed on the trim option you're speaking on? Im new to SSDs and I just put one in a similar Mac.
 
BigTy said:
Can someone speed on the trim option you're speaking on? Im new to SSDs and I just put one in a similar Mac.
Click to expand...

OSX disables trim from any drive that's not original Apple product. Dumb really. IIRC you will need to hack the system to think the drive is an original and then trim activates.
 
Its a command. I found the info I was looking for thank you very much.
 
Late response, but I went through this recently. I had a 2008 Macbook I bought, well, in 2008. I had upgraded it to 4gb of ram years ago. Unofficially, this Macbook (and I think the 2009 you mentioned) can really work with 8gb if you have the right firmware upgrade (do a search - you'll find out how to check). I also put in a 120gb SSD. After putting on a fresh copy of El Capitan, this laptop is actually quite useful for various tasks.
I bought eh ram upgrade recently for about $30 from Amazon during a sale. I found a new battery (as my old one was dead) for $35 - it is giving me about a 2.5 hour usage, I think this was about on par with the original battery. The SSD was probably about $60 - although you can find these a lot cheaper nowadays. I bought the SSD several years ago. Heck, Microcenter has an off brand 120 gb SSD for $25.
In my case, it can do office products (I'm using Apple's as I already bought them years ago), Xcode (original reason I bought this in the first place), and web browsing. Honestly, I think it handles these tasks nicely.
 
The biggest expense for me would be a new keyboard/trackpad assembly. You used to be able to get them for $30 or so on ebay for newish ones and now they are $75+ for ones that are beat.
 
I love [H].
I just popped in to post 'I just got this old MBP.. it's worth it to add SSD/RAM for the basics, yah? ...and there's a thread for basically the same thing. WIN.
...and thanks for the heads up on trim. I wouldn't have thought the OS disabled it by default. : /
 
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