I found a dusty MacBook!

[Niallhogan]

As i was looking around the cellar in my new work i came across a white 13" macbook 2009. the condition seems pretty good so i have faith that it will work!

however, when i boot, it chimes but the display remains black, and theres abit of noise coming from the cd drive, but it loads and ejects just fine.

after abit of googling i may have some soloutions but i dont think it will be easy.

im leaving it to recharge fully as its been flat for about a year, and have been told that resetting the ram cards may solve it.

anyway, has anyone had a similar experience and managed to fix it or any ideas?

dont wanna hear "logic boards fried" as i dont think it is.

cheers!

 

[rabidz7]

As i was looking around the cellar in my new work i came across a white 13" macbook 2009. the condition seems pretty good so i have faith that it will work!

however, when i boot, it chimes but the display remains black, and theres abit of noise coming from the cd drive, but it loads and ejects just fine.

after abit of googling i may have some soloutions but i dont think it will be easy.

im leaving it to recharge fully as its been flat for about a year, and have been told that resetting the ram cards may solve it.

anyway, has anyone had a similar experience and managed to fix it or any ideas?

dont wanna hear "logic boards fried" as i dont think it is.

cheers!

Try creating an xDrive(USB drive with bootable OS X on it) on another computer, and booting from it by holding alt option at boot.

 

[Niallhogan]

Try creating an xDrive(USB drive with bootable OS X on it) on another computer, and booting from it by holding alt option at boot.

good idea! i'll give it a go, lion should run shouldnt it?

also, just tried Option-command-p-r and the screen flickered! not a bad sign!

 

[Dalton63841]

it chimes but the display remains black

Possibly it was left there because the display went out...

 

[Niallhogan]

Possibly it was left there because the display went out...

could be, so i want to fix it! it seems the more charge its getting the more the screen flickers, and now when its in sleep and i open it it flickers again.

im hoping that its just the battery, but if all i need to do is change the display its a small price for what ill be getting

 

[Dalton63841]

could be, so i want to fix it! it seems the more charge its getting the more the screen flickers, and now when its in sleep and i open it it flickers again.

im hoping that its just the battery, but if all i need to do is change the display its a small price for what ill be getting

Oh definitely. Even if you do have to replace the entire display half you can find that used for like 2-300.

 

[Niallhogan]

the internet hasnt been able to help me, tried lots of things to no avail. just some screen flickering.

my mate had the same problem with his a few years ago and had to use an external monitor to use it so im thinking this may be an exisiting problem with these machines.

open to ideas anyone!

 

[0007776]

open to ideas anyone!

Do you have access to an external monitor you can try it with? If you do try it with that so you can get an idea of if it is just the screen that doesn't work or if there is more to the problem than that before you wast a bunch of money trying to repair it.

 

[CMCM]

As i was looking around the cellar in my new work i came across a white 13" macbook 2009. the condition seems pretty good so i have faith that it will work!

however, when i boot, it chimes but the display remains black, and theres abit of noise coming from the cd drive, but it loads and ejects just fine.

after abit of googling i may have some soloutions but i dont think it will be easy.

im leaving it to recharge fully as its been flat for about a year, and have been told that resetting the ram cards may solve it.

anyway, has anyone had a similar experience and managed to fix it or any ideas?

dont wanna hear "logic boards fried" as i dont think it is.

cheers!

I just acquired one of these....a girl threw it out (literally) because the screen was black and she decided her dad should buy her a new one. So I took it to the Apple genius bar for analysis. I knew the drive was booting just fine (could hear it), and I read somewhere to use a flashlight on the screen to see if I could "see" anything...and I could! The log-in screen etc. was there, so at the very least the backlight was out. The whole backlight issue apparently required that the entire LCD be replaced. Anyhow, I spent $280 at Apple and here's what they did in the repair: LCD had power but no image or video, so they replaced the LCD and display bezel. They replaced the 2.26 GHz logic board due to no video. The battery was failing so they replaced that. The bottom case had delamination (whatever that is, I thought it looked fine) so that was also replaced. I left it with the Apple store, and it was back in 5 days. Apparently it got sent to Texas, but that was a quick turn-around.

Since this was a freebee for me, I decided the $280 wasn't bad at all to get a pretty good basic Macbook to give to someone I know who needs it! I was actually shocked at the price because when I researching what to do on the internet, I kept reading repair prices up near $750 or so, which wouldn't have been worth it.