Hi guys,
I recently got my hands on a broken MBA, model 1466, from 2012. I popped the lid and started investigating. The first thing I noticed was a shorted capacitor, which had started bubbling. It seems that the bad cap also resulted in the lipo battery running down to 0.0V, great!
So, I swapped the cap with a one from a spare board and proceeded to power up the unit. Apple Hardware tests then indicated fan failure. It seemed that the fan had an internal shortcircuit as well. So, off to my favourite website I ordered a new fan. It finally came in the mail yesterday, and after installing it, AHT showed "No trouble found".
However, even though the unit does not recognize any hardware errors it acts extremely sluggish. I started pondering wether this could have something to do with me running it without the faulty battery, and some posts online suggest that Macs clock down their CPU frequency to half when no battery is present. Another post somewhere suggested that Macbook Airs are even worse, and become basically unusable if you just run them of the AC plug.
If I get it working I will sooner or later have to order a new battery, but what do you guys think, might the extreme sluggishness be a result of the battery being unplugged? I mean it's running at below 10% of what it should, pointer is laggy, and keyboard input takes 0.5 seconds between each letter. I don't really feel like spending $$$ on a battery only to find out that the whole logic board is broken.
I recently got my hands on a broken MBA, model 1466, from 2012. I popped the lid and started investigating. The first thing I noticed was a shorted capacitor, which had started bubbling. It seems that the bad cap also resulted in the lipo battery running down to 0.0V, great!
So, I swapped the cap with a one from a spare board and proceeded to power up the unit. Apple Hardware tests then indicated fan failure. It seemed that the fan had an internal shortcircuit as well. So, off to my favourite website I ordered a new fan. It finally came in the mail yesterday, and after installing it, AHT showed "No trouble found".
However, even though the unit does not recognize any hardware errors it acts extremely sluggish. I started pondering wether this could have something to do with me running it without the faulty battery, and some posts online suggest that Macs clock down their CPU frequency to half when no battery is present. Another post somewhere suggested that Macbook Airs are even worse, and become basically unusable if you just run them of the AC plug.
If I get it working I will sooner or later have to order a new battery, but what do you guys think, might the extreme sluggishness be a result of the battery being unplugged? I mean it's running at below 10% of what it should, pointer is laggy, and keyboard input takes 0.5 seconds between each letter. I don't really feel like spending $$$ on a battery only to find out that the whole logic board is broken.
