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CPU: 2.5 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T9300Memory: 6 GB 667 MHz DDR2 RAMStorage: 250 GB Samsung EVO 870 SSDGPU: NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT with 512 MB of VRAMOS: Mac OS MontereyCondition: Works perfectly |
I've been searching for this model for months at this point, after my last one couldn't get repaired. I kinda gave up searching locally so I turned to eBay. A bit of browsing later I found a not-so-promising but cheap one for parts that was listed as not working for only 30 euros. I knew it was a huge risk but I ordered it. After a month it arrived. Turning it on I got a chime and a white screen with nothing else. Good sign! If I was lucky it was just the GPU as expected. I gave it for repairs to a friend of mine but he couldn't find a replacement GPU. All he had were ones that could address only half of the VRAM because they were 64-bit and not 128. More months passed and finally in April of 2024 he finally got the chip and called me, saying it was fixed. I went to test it with him and it booted! But it wouldn't recognise any HDD we put in it... uh oh. We tried like 5 different drives and it wouldn't see them for some reason. I got worried. After that he gave me a really good SSD and without much hope I tried it and... it worked!! Next was the RAM, it only works with PC2-5300 and refuses to boot with anything faster. Wow, pickiest machine I've ever used. I went and bought 4 GB of RAM for it and an SSD, trying them beforehand to make sure they worked.
I was thinking I was done with this machine but I quickly noticed after using it for a little bit that the fans were constantly running at full blast, even though the CPU or GPU were not getting hot at all. Thankfully, that was a quick fix as one of the tiny cables on the logic board next to the left fan wasn't plugged in. After fixing that, it now works wonderfully!
This MacBook also has the best keyboard I've ever used on a laptop, and somehow made me beat my all-time high score first-try which (pic below).
Update 05/01/2025 - Upgraded RAM from 4 to 6 GB and replaced cheap 256 GB SSD with Samsung EVO 870 250 GB SSD
Update 30/01/2025 - Recently I corrupted by Mojave install, near the middle of the month, and decided to install Monterey using OCLP. It runs nicely
