2007 17" MacBook Pro pick up
This evening a parcel was received for a cheap 17" MacBook Pro I picked up from eBay for only $120 AUD. Don't need it, but it appeared to be in good condition for its age only having one owner since new. It had a logic board and battery replacement at some point, and also included 2 power adapters, 2 remote controls, and the original DVDs.
The owner had trouble getting it going, often stuck on a plain blue screen on startup (might have actually been his desktop wallpaper). I was hoping there wasn't a serious hardware issue. I attempted using the original DVD with had a late version of Leopard but would come up saying that OS X cannot be installed, despite recognising the hard disk and being freshly formatted. I had a copy of OS X Lion lying around, so used that and it works!
I discovered it has the optional 1920 x 1200 display, not the standard 1680 x 1050 which is nice. I think a RAM upgrade is needed though.
Comments
Do you know what year model this Pro is? If it's new enough, you could install High Sierra on it and continue on your way.
EDIT: Just took a good look at this picture. That thing is BIG! Compare its speaker grills to those of a newer (non-retina) 15" MacBook Pro. The ones on the 17" are twice as large!
I mentioned 2007 in the title, though I think more specifically it's the "mid-2007" model.
El Capitan is as good as it'll get with this one. For Sierra onwards, you really need a 2010 model as the bare minimum. Having a small gold MacBook with High Sierra on it, I don't mind if this doesn't so much given how little I paid for it. If I grab a copy of El Capitan to put on it, I'm sure extra RAM would help substantially.
It's a dual core Intel, 2 GB DDR2 RAM, 160 GB HDD, and something along the lines of a Nvidia 8600 GT if I remembered right. Especially compared to owning a MacBook you do notice the size of it, as well as the heat coming out of it!
Wow, that's one of those machines I've been wanting to get my hands on for ages. People selling them around here seem to think that just because they have an Apple logo on them means they're immediately worth 5 times more than a comparable Windows machine. Ridiculous if you ask me. Nice find though!
You could argue that with new Macs.
With OS X Lion installed I was able to directly download and update to El Capitan via the App Store for free. Runs better than expected given the RAM just meets minimum requirements. I found out unofficially it supports up to 6 GB, though it has meant that everyone wants to charge a heap for a 2 and 4 GB stick combination on eBay. So instead for only $17 I went for 2 new Samsung sticks of 2 GB straight from China.
I run El Capitan on a Dell OptiPlex 780 and the only bottleneck is the 5400RPM drive I'm using. El Capitan runs wonderfully on older hardware.