My First Mac

So, this, this is definitely a learning curve, as an avid avoider of Mac OS and any Apple products for years, I have finally succumb to my industry requirement and purchased myself a 10 year old Macbook Pro (Which if you’re interested I’m actually using to type this).

As expected a machine bought second hand from the Facebook market place, it wasn’t in the best of conditions, but I bought it cheap and thought – Hey, you know what? I’m a pretty savvy guy when it comes to hardware, I’ll figure this out.

The machine in itself was technically fully functional, and the charging cable, even though it looks like it would electrocute you just by looking at it does charge the device – Good head Start here!

I power on this machine of the devil and log in with the credentials provided after hearing the bootup “Chime” of my now new learning environment, I find myself on a desktop with a Dock? (I believe that’s what it is called) filled with default applications which come bundled with the system, all, of course for use and to connect to and sync with other Apple branded devices.

I moved the cursor towards the top of the screen to see if I could connect to my WiFi and to my surprise it supported 5Ghz, not even my 10 year old Windows based machines have that.
So there I was, My second hand, wobbly screen, dirty, 320GB Mechanical Hard Disk 4GB of DDR3 RAM Macbook Pro Mid 2010.

This is where the fun begins…
Alright, I have the machine, first things first, before I actually start using this thing properly, I am going to have to clean it, so out came the cleaning wipes and within a few minutes the outside was fully presentable again… The Inside however was a different Story; luckily the back of the machine only required a small Philips head screw driver, which I had as I like taking stuff apart, I remove the top panel, remembering where each screw goes for reassembly later and set them aside, now I see why they sold it for cheap, the inside was full of hair, crumbs and dust, my guess was that it was overheating, that and the extremely wobbly screen; I held my breath and pulled out my DataVac (Like an air compressor for computers), I held the fan and let it rip. Dust, skin, hair and goodness knows what else went flying, but underneath lay a clean system once again.

Next step, there is no way in hell I was going to be putting up with a screen with so much movement, so I hit YouTube, looked for a tutorial on how to fix this, to my surprise there was 2 methods, or well, two situations which can cause the screen wobble, one of which is an easy fix, the other… Not so easy…. Any guesses which one I had to do?

If you guessed the easy fix, you would be wrong, (This should have been an omen for what was to come). Hard fix it was! After removing a very delicate cable, to remove a cable tidy, to remove a sticker, to remove 3 screws then repeat on the other side with the same precision, I gritted my teeth as I slid the entire screen assembly away from the main unit, there were lots of swearwords going through my head at this point, which I shall not repeat.
Once the screen was removed, I fought with a curved piece of plastic to which when re-assembled gives the back of the machine it’s ‘Clean streamlined look’ I found the small screws which I had to adjust, which required me to find a stupidly sized torx driver in my screw driver kit, screws tightened, I reattached the screen to the body, putting back in all the screws, slotting back in the delicate cables, asking myself why I did that to myself, but there it was! A non-wobbly screen, all that stress, all that pressure to get rid of a wobble.. Let it be noted, I may have not been able to put a few things back together, but they’re not essential, so never mind.

Next! Next I thought, lets see if I can upgrade the RAM to something a touch more reasonable, I had two eight gig sticks of DDR3 laying around, chucked them in and… Nothing, not a blip, not even a tickle, I looked up online prior to this and it said it was compatible with Sixteen Gig of RAM, what was going on?!? I spoke to my good friend John who is a Mac and PC Guru, he told me Mac’s are a pain in the arse when it comes to memory, so I would have to get special ‘Mac Memory’ – I went ahead, bought the memory which Should have been compatible, waiting eagerly for my £67 investment to get delivered, beaming with excitement when it arrived, I opened the packaging, opened back up the Mac (As this was a few days later) popped the RAM in and Boom! Nothing… Turns out, little did I know, that there are TWO different mid 2010 MacBook Pro’s; one which accepts a certain speed of RAM and the other doesn’t… My heart sank, I hopped back on to Amazon and requested a refund (Will be sending them back this week).

Well, I suppose at this point, I could throw an SSD in and get a touch more performance out of this thing, and it would help with the thermal issues all Macs have, put the SSD in, stuck in the installation Media and booted up… I click install and “This installation media for Mac OS High Sierra is corrupt and could not be used”
Once again, I called up John who laughed after explaining the entire above ordeal, apparently, after cleaning the system and because I did maintenance, I did the sensible thing and disconnected the battery, not knowing that that is no CMOS battery to keep the system time and date – Here is where one of my first lessons of Mac OS was, opening Terminal I had to follow a guide on how to manually set time and date using bash, phew, easy, hopped back on to the installation, and moved forward!

So here I am, one CLEAN MacBook Pro 2010, 4GB of RAM and a 250GB SSD and you know what? It actually performs alright-ish. Maybe. Possibly. [Subject to which way the wind is blowing] now is my time to finally get to know Mac OS and fill in my missing skill gap.