Need advice on buying a 2009 MBP

[john402052000]

I currently have a MBP with the follow specs:

OS 10.6.8
2.26 GHz Intel Core Duo
8G ram
500G SSD

I've been having all sorts of problems with this machine. It will hard freeze anywhere from 1 to 30 times daily. After years of diagnosis I'm pretty sure a very swollen battery has put some micro-cracks on the motherboard. Here's a previous thread:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/need-to-replace-logic-board-on-mbp.1988759/#post-23256873

It was suggested I try to get a replacement board through eBay. Instated I found the same machine on Craigslist for $150. The problem is that this machine freezes when watching videos. I met the owner for coffee. He couldn’t get it to freeze for me. When his freezes the screen goes dim and he gets the multi-lingual restart message. When mine freezes it just freezes. The mouse and keyboard are completely unresponsive. If a video is playing a rhythmic “bip bip bip bip bip” will cycle endlessly until I restart.

He took it to a Mac Store and they told him that his battery and hard drive could be failing. What I don’t want to do is buy a machine with the exact same problem. What my plan is would be to buy his MBP and install my SSD and new battery in it and use it as my work station.

Is there a way for me to diagnose what’s causing his machine to crash? Any help would be great.

 

[thats all folks]

if you buy a machine that old you should expect to have to replace the battery and hard drive and probably the power supply/charger. nothing lasts forever.

 

[jav6454]

Yes you can take it to Apple for an diagnostic check up. Don't know if that'll be charged thou. They'll tell you which parts you need. A 2009 MBP should still be serviceable.

 

[Ries]

Core Duo is just too slow for today's world. Go for a corei5/i7 model and stay away from dGPU's on those old models (or check if the model's dGPU is listed as problematic). Replace the harddrive with your SSD and you got a nice machine for a few years (if it holds up).

 

[john402052000]

Thanks for all the replies. In my current machine I've replaced the RAM, the hard drive with an SSD and have put a new battery in it.

I believe the seller already took his MBP to an Apple dealer. I'll get him to clarify that.

thanks,

John

 

[john402052000]

So it looks like I could buy a late 2011 MBP on Ebay for about $350. Would the performance difference be worth it?

 

[swester]

So it looks like I could buy a late 2011 MBP on Ebay for about $350. Would the performance difference be worth it?

Something to keep in mind: a lot of the 2011 15" MBP models had problems with the dedicated graphics cards. Honestly, I'd just be hesitant buying a 5 year old laptop - that's a lot of ownership time. For a few hundred more, you probably could pick up a more recent Macbook Air which would be faster for everyday tasks.

 

[john402052000]

I landed a 2011 MBP on ebay. I did some research and it looks like those came with 10.6 as the stock OS, with an upgrade to 10.6.7 suggested. My current 2009 MBP is running 10.6.8 on a relatively new 500G SSD. Shouldn't I be able to replace the drive coming in the 2011 ebay purchase with my current SSD and then boot up no problem? Since my 2009 MBP is having hard reboot issues I'm very hesitant to try and upgrade the OS on that unit.