I honestly can’t remember where I got this laptop. I have been given so many pieces of tech over my lifetime, either to restore or to recycle, that inevitably one or two are going to drop through the cracks. This 13-inch MacBook Pro from 2012 is one of those. Sorry, little guy.

I pulled this out of the spares pile with the Compaq in order to donate it to a fundraiser for my local nerd con. The Compaq gave up the ghost, so I was hoping that this one still had some life left. I procured a charger (First generation MagSafe? Cool!) from a friend of mine who had spares, and checked the battery and tested the RAM. All looked good.

Once again, the goal was to swap out the spinning hard drive for a SSD, upgrade the RAM to the max the motherboard would allow, and run a test installation of Alma Linux. (That’s the distro they’ll be installing at the fund raiser.) This one has a Core 2 Duo processor and uses DDR3 SODIMMs, rather than DDR2. Luckily, I had two 4 GB sticks lying around, and still had the SSD from the previous upgrade attempt.

Not everything went as smoothly as I’d hoped. The RAM was almost too large to physically fit in the slot. I had to do several rounds of re-seating to get it all recognized and usable. The optical drive was dead as a doornail, and I couldn’t get the USB version of the Ultimate Boot CD to boot. So, thorough testing wasn’t something I would be able to do. Also, while attempting to install Alma, it was getting a processor deprecation error – who stops supporting whole swaths of CPUs? C’mon, now! – and it would not install.

Once again, I was foiled. This time, only partially. While Alma wouldn’t install, Linux Mint (XFCE edition) installed perfectly, and ran snappily to boot! YouTube, Twitch, ad-heavy news article web pages, all loaded quickly, in the most recent version of Firefox! The battery holds a charge! It won’t end up in the fundraiser, but it’s a great backup laptop in case my current one dies. I’m definitely keeping it around.