Swapping MacBook screens

Well, Margretta’s old 2011 headless MacBook Pro is still running. But swapping out a new screen didn’t fix its problem. Namely, it doesn’t have a working screen, which is a real bother, complicated by the fact that I actually need a laptop that will also run Snow Leopard (mid-2011 was the last year that the Snow Leopard OS was supported) for editing and scanning software that too has been rendered obsolete. Not to mention software for those back taxes.

And it’s nice to have a laptop I can move around. You know, actually use on my lap. Margaretta’s old MBP is tethered to an wonky lavender-hued external Apple LCD monitor—which is also losing its resolution. Now, I love lavender and all things purple, but not on a screen. It’s OK for Netflix, but makes editing photos a nightmare. I harbored some vague hope that swapping screens would work, I had nothing to lose. It was way easier than I expected, so I was pretty chuffed.

I do have other obsolete MacBook Pros, but this one was once my main squeeze for a few years as it has most of my work (photo archives) on it. And it runs my scanning and editing software. I have an exceedingly pricey top of the line Epson negative film scanner that cost $1200. Scanning old negatives was my big pandemic sequestration project.

I have file cabinets of thin black and white negatives of famous artists musicians and writers I need to bring into the 21st. c. (See a few samples here.) Reason enough to keep a working version of Snow Leopard alive. And before you ask, yes, I tried some of the newer third-party scanner software. No joy.

Then there are those back taxes. Shhh! As a teaching artist/poet, I make so little money, I am below the poverty belt, so to speak, but because I am also self-employed, I might as well be a billionaire as far as filing complicated taxes goes. 

Salvaging retro-media

Today is a double-retro media day, liberating James Lee Burke from the ferrous oxide confines of audio cassette books to the cyberworld of digital media format. One MacBook is running Audacity to convert old audio cassette tapes. The other, transcribing CDs. Nothing went swimmingly. It’s complicated.

Imagine my surprise when I ordered four audiobooks on eBay, only to discover they were all on audio cassette tapes. TAPES! Ouch. I did not see that coming. But I was determined to listen to his books, so I had to reinvent the wheel, which meant hauling out an old 2010 MacBook, and borrowing a cassette recorder that had USB connectivity. Of course it wouldn’t work. Of course not. No instructions either. Made in China. You get the picture. Quality Google time, I found I needed Audacity too. OK, retro software. I haven’t used Audacity in 20 years. TG for open source software, it was still around. Many hat tricks under the bridge later, I got it to work, sort of—by using an auxiliary speaker. 

I discovered that Bluetooth speakers won’t work with retro MacBooks or software. Workaround: a speaker wire. My kingdom for a freaking speaker wire. Housesitting’s a btch when you need doohickies. 

Speakerwire scored, two days later. But the recording was too distorted when played through speakers. So I swapped the speaker for headphones and fiddled some more and got Audacity to recognize the USB connections from the audio cassette player. Voilá. The right stuff. The process made me reevaluate the aphorism, third time’s a charm. In my case, third time was pure luck. But the process sure wasn’t intuitive. Not exactly ProTools.

I’ve also learned how to transcribe and clean up audiotapes. I now know what the sound waves of an electronic fart looks like, or an electronic pop, and the difference between them and a terminal K or S, and plosive Ps, or the reader gasping for breath. I learned you can remove much of a word’s sound wave to eliminate distortion (a lot). And it still sounds like a word. Luckily only one tape needed doctoring. But time was not kind to the slide guitar intros, transitions, and exits. So I learned how to clean them up too. Thank you Carlos, sound guy for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, for letting me look over your shoulder in the recording studio so many years ago. Osmosis happens.

Also, I wanted to move New Iberia Blues to my music files so I could listen to it again later on my iPad vs my car CD player, as much of it is poetry. This man writes pure poetry on the slant. I about died when he described the sky or the bayou. I have to rewind and listen again. And again. And again. This man has a bad case of metaphor and he knows how to use it. A writer’s writer. And yes, I do get the obscure literary references embedded like Easter eggs throughout his stories. 

So I popped a CD into my MacBook, fired up iTunes. Nada. I hadn’t counted on my disk reader being wonky. I popped in another CD, nada. Since, I knew Toast worked on this old MacBook, I fired it up, and it triggered the DVD player to read the CD. Talk about going around the horn. By disk 10, I learned the trick, slam that mothersucker into the CD slot like a curve ball over home plate, top of the 9th, bases are loaded. And iTunes arrives all out of breath, wanting to know the score.

Why all the bother, you ask? Why not just buy a digital copy and use an iPad/Pod/Phone? Good question. Most of James Lee Burke’s work has not made it to digital format. And I have an old car with a CD player, no USB or auxiliary functions. The fake radio bluetooth workaround doesn’t work. So if I want to listen to James Lee Burke’s work, I need to go to extreme workarounds.

But I think I’ve met my match with Sunset Limited. I fixed one busted tape, rewinding and splicing it onto a new cassette holder, recorded it with only two bust-ups. TG for ScotchTape. But the final cassette rewound wrong and got tangled. Even I can’t fix this one. So close to the end too.

MacBookPro journals

A couple of months ago, I managed to find a mid-2012 MacBookPro I planned to soup up. I was just about to buy one last year when COVID-19 struck. That put a big wrench in things. No one wanted to meet up. Not for love, nor money—and certainly not for old MacBooks. 

After a few Marketplace deals fell through at the last minute, I despaired. One seller gave her MBP to her brother at the last moment—as I was leaving to pick it up. But the real asscake was the guy who sold the MBP I had planned to purchase—during the time it took me to drive down from Sonoma to SF. 

He then tried to fob off another dead MBP in its place, saying, Yeah, it works fine but the battery is dead. Yeah, no. I felt like I was in the Monty Python dead parrot sketch. I tried all the restart tricks in the book, including attempting to jumpstart it with a portable hard drive with an OS. Dead motherboard, and the battery indicator was green. After trying to sell it to me for parts, he handed me the dead MBP as a doorprize—but, hey, at least the battery was good, I swapped it out.

I am amazed by all those oily Marketplace guys offhandedly trying to fob off their lemony laptop’s age, or obfuscate its speed, or hide its lack of memory. As if I wouldn’t notice. After months of scanning ads for overpriced MBPs on Marketplace (Craigslist was useless), I finally found a likely candidate. It had to be a faster mid-2012 MacBookPro, not early-2012, not late-2012 (non-upgradable Retina). And not too expensive. 

I met this guy in the Richmond Costco parking lot, he was solid, not trying to hide anything. After a cursory check, I didn’t even barter—I paid more than I wanted for his MacBook Pro—$300. But it had good bones and a fast GhZ speed. My fastest used Mac purchase ever. I didn’t even need to run the usual checks. 

Besides, he had also upgraded it to Catalina at my request. That was the deal clincher. He had no idea that it would even run Catalina. As I put it through its paces, he looked at it anew. I was afraid he’d change his mind right there in the parking lot. I paid him off so fast, I forgot to get a bill of sale. Alas, I needed Catalina to run TurboTax. It seem the only reason I ever upgrade my MacBooks is to run tax software. A sad state of affairs.

Updating old technology for tax season: The horror! The horror!

I'm about to upgrade to El Capitán/High Sierra, as my trusty Mac OS companion of 8.5 years, Snow Leopard, is no longer long of tooth, but bereft of any pearly whites whatsoever. The latest discovery that the Intel chip has a back door, much to the delight of Hackers Anon, means every technological agency is tightening up bootstraps in order to stick their big toes (and cocks—whatever is largest) to shoal up the wall of data vulnerability.

And in turn, data service providers are also tightening things up. This translates to my web browser Firefox being no longer upgradeable, Safari  5 is next to useless, having long since lost The Great Browser Race. I can't even load a Daily Kos petition because my browser's too old and therefore "vulnerable." I can see tighter security needed if I'm actually donating money (I'm not), but to fill out a petition? And who knew that MacWorld articles were top secret documents FYEO fergawdsakes? (For your eyes only.)

Then there's the new and improved software: take TurboTax. Ah, yes, the tax season rears its ugly head, and shoves it up yer arse looking for fool's gold. That's the litmus I use to update software. When I need to load TurboTax. That's how I updated another hard drive to Mountain Lion, and later, to Mavericks.

Suffice to say, I hated both Mountain Lion, and Mavericks with a passion (I hated all the OS updates until Catalina), but I managed to convince TurboTax to play nicely on my MacBook, so I could file my taxes. Sort of. (BTW, TurboTax did not require such stringent hoops for Windows users during this time. And we KNOW how vulnerable Windows is. My partner has an old PC laptop with a crusty virus-ridden version of Windows that still runs TurboTax. What's with that?)

So, after I blithely purchased this year's version of TurboTax, I read the FINE PRINT. Minuscule. Unreadable without a microscope, or #2 readers, whatever's handiest. Minimum system requirements, written in 6 point white type on grey background: such secretive minimum operating system requirement: OS 10.11. Whoa, Nellie! That's El Capitán. O Captain! My Captain! Decapitate me now.

We went from the rogue sneaker waves of Mavericks, that's OS 10.9 to you, to the heights of Machu Pucchu, I mean—that mile-high monolith, that sheer granite wall of El Capitán, AKA OS 10.11, that has challenged so many climbers—in one fell swoop? In one year? What happened to OS 10.10? Holy crappy crampons! The Krampus came late this year. Or he came back for seconds.

So, (remembering to breathe), I took a shot, and steeled my nerves. I girded my loins, and began to upgrade a hard drive to El Capitán. Painful. After more than an hour of upgrading, it worked swimmingly. Until it didn't. This I found out after I went two OS'es further down the plankety-plank road to perdition, to the holiest grail of OS of time present—High Sierra, AKA OS 10.13. Lucky 13, it wasn't. I was locked out. Epic password fail. Black screen. Spinning cursor of death. Random restarts. Complete disappearance of the Finder. Again. And again. And again.

So I spent an entire day (and most of the next day too), trying to coax two fussy operating systems to play nicely on my souped-up 2011 MacBook Pro. I learned some things. New tricks, old dawg. I practiced deep rebuilds and even deeper cleanses. I gnashed my teeth. I invented new portmanteaus swearwords. Corrupted kext files? I found combo update fixes. Suffice to say, El Capitán is now working. Or at least, I can load it. I haven't even opened TurboTax. Too exhausted. I'm afraid to even restart High Sierra.

Ah, well, there's always next year.

Hotroddin' my MacBookies

These days I'm using as my main computer, a headless 2011 MacBookPro 8,1 tricked out with 16 GB memory & a Seagate hybrid drive (smokin'!), with an old 23" Apple monitor that has a decidedly lavender cast. (It was free.)

My friend Margretta gave her MacBookPro a little drinky-poo, a very generous glass of chardonnay. But the MacBookPro was far too young to drink. Apple carded it, said it needed a motherboard and possibly a video card as well. Toast points were mentioned.

So I inherited her MacBookPro for parts. It took some doing to get it up and running. Mostly burping and patting, using all manner of mashed keyboard patterns, until it turned on. Surprisingly, the battery took a charge. It needed memory and a hard drive. I don't turn it off very often, for fear it won't restart. The screen really is burnt toast. Or it's still suffering from an alcoholic blackout. Maybe it needs to join AA.

I cleaned what dried chardonnay I could see on the motherboard but was told that it will eventually short out as the acid from the wine will continue to corrode the connections. A good thing it wasn't zinfandel or a good chianti. Sliss. I always meant to give it a water bath, but I was too chickenshit to immerse it. So far, so good. I'll cross that bridge....

What I've learned is that the best way to revamp and breathe new life into elderMacs is with some OWC memory (some models can take twice, or even quadruple the memory than Apple recommends), and OWC's reasonably priced Seagate solid state hybrid drives (SSHD), if you can't afford the real Solid State Drives.

You can never be too rich, too thin, have enough memory or a fast enough hard drive. Buy the maximum memory your Mac will support, and a solid state drive. You won't regret it. A word of caution: if you plan to go above and beyond those Apple specs, get your memory sticks from Other World Computing (aka macsales.com) as they're guaranteed to work. Other brands don't play well together.

With these two simple upgrades, the MacBookPro, and kin, fairly flies through its paces. Try buying a souped-up 2.3 GHz Intel Core i5 MacBookPro 2011 (8,1) for a couple of C-notes and chump change. Unsouped it goes for $650-800 according to Everymac.com. OK, so, well, maybe not, as it is a headless horseman, ergo, it's permanently tethered to my big LCD screen....

My previous rescue Mac project, and old headless souped up 2007 MacBookPro 3,1 is now the flatscreen TV's very own Mac. The MBP was some skateboarder's thrashed pet MacOllie project, I got it for a C-note off Craigslist. I put another couple of C-notes into it (it needed a battery too), and a $17 BookEndz Docking Station took care of most of the thrashed ports.

It was a real hassle to work around having no screen (bad inverter) when the hard drive went south. I had to reformat it on another Mac. It also had a bad DVD drive, wonky audio ports, no microphone or speakers to speak of. (I bought it for the 64-bit Intel Core 2 Duo processor so I could run TurboTax—probably the only reason why I upgrade my Macs, to pay my taxes, yetch. I need a drink). I persevered with myriad odd workarounds, and got several fabulous years' worth of hotroddy use out of it.

I couldn't turn it off very often either, as the off-on switch is grotty. So, a new battery was a must. I added a Seagate solid state hybrid drive, and doubled the maximum proscribed memory, and the old MBP thought it was a rocket.

My current Mac rescue rebuild project: a 2.26 GHz MacBook Late 2009 Unibody, for Neil, and for me, a 2010 MacBook (swappable polycarbonate case, screen, trackpad, keyboard, memory & batteries). An added bonus—it has a working screen. A real laptop I can take with me when I teach. Or run TurboTax.

I did my homework, it took several months of searching Craigslist to find the MacBook model I wanted (at 2.4GHz, the mid-2010 MacBook shares parts with the late 2009 MacBook, and the 2009-2010 MacBookPro). Processor speed and compatibility are important. They all swap spit, as it were. But even more significant, it would support 16 GB of memory, critical to run the latest Mac OS.

The 2010 MacBook was positively crippled with 4 GB memory, which, according to Apple, was the maximum amount of memory it could support, but I found it was barely functional with double that, at 8 GB of memory. Hard to believe it shipped with only 2 GB of memory. No wonder the woman was selling it. Spinning beachballs drive me mad. What was Apple thinking? But with 16 GBs of OWC memory it's now a blazingly fast machine. It has a new lease on life.

Also, I was told that the MacBook couldn't access the full 16 GB memory under Snow Leopard (I'd only get 8 GB), that the tweaked memory hack only worked under Mountain Lion or later. Not true. I have full 16 GB of memory, so much memory, Snow Leopard hardly knows what to do with itself.

Cost for the 2010 MacBook via Craigslist was a C-note, I already had the SSHD from my 2009 MB, I swapped it. Memory was $130, so a souped up 2010 seldom-used MacBook (almost-Pro) for $230, (or $330, counting the SSHD), isn't bad at all, considering that lesser dysfunctional MacBooks were going for much more on Craigslist.

The 2009 MacBook I got for free (bad trackpad and bulging battery, replete with the slow OEM Apple hard drive, and 2 GBs of basic memory meant it was dysfunctional). A new battery, 8 GB of memory (Apple said that 4 GB was maximum supported memory), and a SSHD drive set me back nearly $300, but I got 3-and-a-half years' worth of trouble-free computing from it. Time to pass it onto Neil who's kvetching up a storm on the limitations of the old Macbook 1,1.

It was a little weird taking the bulging battery out of the unibody case. But OWC provided the odd tri-flange screwdriver and clear instructions with the battery. I had it swapped out in no time. Apple never mean for us lackeys to ever change those batteries. Non-user entropy or something. You can look undah mah hood but no touching!

Alas, I discovered the original OEM Apple 5400 RPM hard drive that came with the 2010 MacBook was painfully SLOW! Reformatting did not help. By contrast, the Seagate hybrid drive is a miracle worker. Having that solid state NAND flash chip for basic repetitive functions really speeds processes up. Never underestimate the speed of a hard drive on basic OS functions.

(A note: the combo of the solid state drive and maxed out memory meant the 2009 MacBook ran hot, and the skidproof silicone backing on its bottom partially peeled off, making it a sticky duct tape debris dream in droopy diapers. Not a pretty sight. A plastic outer case kept its drawers in place. When I switched to the Seagate hybrid drive, the MacBook ran cooler, and I was able to clean it up and massage its bottom back onto the aluminum case.

Actually I was looking for a junked 2009 case so I could fix the bottom on mine, and the trackpad too when I stumbled upon the 2010 MacBook. And one thing led to another.)

Souped up, these two models are basically throttled MacBookPros in white polycarbonate bodies and fewer ports. (Not having the flash memory card port is a minus). The large hybrid drives are replete with multiple OS systems so I can swap systems on the go if I want to. Plus, with all that added memory, the MacBooks can handle High Sierra...

I will probably stick with El Capitan, though. (Bottleneck OS speed is an issue with Sierra). But truth be known, I prefer the surprisingly stable, and might I add, zippy (with maxed out memory and SSHD) Snow Leopard. So, I'm straddling the OS decades and hedging my bets.

It's like pulling teeth, weaning Neil off from my old 2006 warhorse MacBook 1,1 which is alive and well, but Snow Leopard is the end of the OS line for the first 32-bit Intel Core Macs. (I tried running Mountain Lion on it. Mistake. I had to pull the hard drive to get it out of white screen.) The old MacBook 1,1 is a souped up (2GB memory (it came with 512 GB memory), plus a real SSD solid state drive) but the trackpad's clicker broke. Try finding a replacement. Yeah. Too old. Time to retire it.

The MacBook 1,1 was the only Macbook I paid "full used market price" for and that was under $1000 as I got it used from Apple Refurb. It promptly blew its 1.0 build motherboard when we were in Scotland, and was replaced with a better one (1.1) for free, thanks to AppleCare. And eleven years later, it's still kicking. Talk about solidly built.

He's resisting the migration to the newer 2009 MacBook I fixed for him—even with the royal blue cover and keypad skin. So I'm refusing to fix the old one. Time to move up, but I still can't get Neil off Snow Leopard—even though I have Mt. Lion and Mavericks systems on all the newer MacBooks. I can't even get him to use an iPod, or an iPad, let alone, an iPhone, or an Android smartphone.

I haven't the heart to tell him that the newest Macs will be more like the iPhone/iPad  iOS, and that the wave of the future is already here. Beasties of different colors in sleekit iOs coats are milling at the gate.

Letter to Gail

Dear Gail, 

This is just to say please excuse the handwritten format of poems as my laptop computer, which took an unauthorized flying lesson, has joined the celestial Macs in the sky, or perhaps it is searching for Beatrice in Dante’s Inferno. And my loaner Mac has no floppy drive so every time I finally get networked, it dies, and loses its identity. I totally understand. I won’t mention the fact that when I backed up all my files, my computer destroyed all my floppy disks with many files rendered unretrievable. Murphy’s Law squared and, cubed. So, I don’t even have access to my teaching files and poems. I heard rumor of my computer’s eminent resurrection on or about Easter, but I’m not holding my breath or waving palm fronds. After much surgery and TLC, it may or may not work. Eventually, I’ll be able to retrieve my files from the hard drive, but at present, it is not an option. So, I have this lesson plan, a flyer, a handout that you might want to use, but if I only had a computer or even a typewriter, I’d flush it out more. If you’re interested, I can work on it during ahem, Easter vacation. 

PS Will says you’re doing well in GV. I don’t know if you remember me. I met you a few times in Berkeley you came to Sonoma to read for us for the Russian River Writers’ Guild. 

PPS it’s raining so hard we’re about to float away. Some April Fool’s joke this turned out to be.

Undated, probably around 1980, what Gail, I don’t know. And GV may stand for either grass valley or Guerneville. Will refers to Will Staple. So it must be Grass Valley.