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.

On a day much like this one, at a garage sale, MonkeyLinkMega found something that would change his life forever. Or, for a couple of years, at most. He found a used laptop, for only $15. A Compaq Presario CQ62. He jumped at the chance to have his own computer, and brought it home, beaming. It needed some love, but, luckily, this Dad knew what to do. Tech Dad replaced the battery, the charging cable, and the keyboard. He added RAM and upgraded the hard drive. Once it had Linux on it, it could ALMOST run a full-screen YouTube clip without stuttering. You see, it only had a single core processor and no dedicated video. (Cue gasps and sobbing)

Eventually, MonkeyLinkMega traded up for something a bit better, and this laptop was consigned to the spares pile. It languished, sad and alone, for years, until one day, the tech-savvy Dad decided he was going to max everything out for a Linux installfest fundraiser.

The maximum RAM was listed as 4GB DDR2 (which it had) on some sites, and 8GB DDR2 on others. Tech Dad splurged on some eBay RAM, which was only expensive because it had become harder to find over the years. He also swapped the spinning platter hard drive out for a SATA SSD, to make sure that storage wouldn’t bottleneck what little speed the laptop could get.

Initially, things were looking good. The full 8GB of RAM was recognized, and several distros of Linux would install, but none of them booted. After several rounds of this, successful booting became intermittent, even off of the USB drives. In the end, the laptop stopped booting at all, and wouldn’t even POST.

Tech Dad had a sad, but knew that the laptop had lived a long and productive life. (It’s me, I’m Tech Dad.) In the end, the RAM and SSD were put in a drawer and the laptop in electronics recycling. Rest in peace, you glorious garage sale find.

Also, if anyone has a need for DDR2 SODIMMs, let me know. :)