Old School 17” Aluminium MBP

[MadTester]

Looking for some help….
My old monster has a few problems (it’s getting old).. 2006 when i first bought it (well end of that year)…

Anyhoo, was wondering if I could take out the old 320gb hd i have in there as it is failing (have to boot in single user mode) and replace it with a fusion drive, plus i need a replacement battery.

I don’t want to scrap it because I love this machine (non-gloss screen 1080p hd)
and it only nowadays gets used for watching movies streamed from my NAS.

Any tips/advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance

 

[venom600]

A fusion drive would require replacing the DVD drive as well as the HD, but I don't even think your machine can run a late enough version of OS X to support fusion drives. I wouldn't bother. I'd just pick up one of the 1TB Seagate SSHD hybrid drives and stick it in for under a hundred bucks.

Also, the screen on those machines wasn't 1080p. Only the later Unibody 17" models had that feature. A battery is going to set you back roughly $100, so you are looking at roughly $200 to modernize it somewhat.

What's interesting with those older machines is that while Apple has abandoned them, they'll run Windows (7-10) beautifully, and will continue to be supported for many years... You may want to consider that if you want to run newer software and extend the life even further.

 

[comda]

What's interesting with those older machines is that while Apple has abandoned them, they'll run Windows (7-10) beautifully, and will continue to be supported for many years... You may want to consider that if you want to run newer software and extend the life even further.

Let the truth be TOLD! I find this extremely sad. Apple is a company that rose from bankruptcy in 1998 with its Bondy Blue imac and they are making the same mistake over again now that Jobs has passed (RIP). The G3's where easily upgradable and even their advertisements made that clear "....comes shipped with 32mb of memory, upgradeable to 128mb). Anyways i find nowadays apple is turning from this upgrading and going to throw away systems with their non upgradable macbooks pros and minis.

These machines arent ancient! Hell Core 2 Duos are still very good systems! And this here angers me. Being a kid (well im turning 20 soon but still) i grew up with very little and up until i got my Macbook 3,1 and even still up until 2012 i was using a totally upgraded Pentium 4 and it ran windonws 7 like a dream! Versus my macbook 3,1 with a 7400 C2D is limited to only windows 7 (no windows 8 drivers not even 64bit windows 7) because like venom600 posted apple abandoned these machines. You'd think that because we paid so much (my macbook when new i paid $1499) would be kept in mind at apple. but no. I cant upgrade any more then Lion which im not. Because lion is terrible on my system due to its small video card.

However. There is a solution if you're confortable doing it. MLPOSTFACTOR. if you can run Lion you can run Mountain Lion on this machine. Check it out. I had it running on my system perfectly other then wifi. it worked but not on WPA2 Enterprise. the schools wifi. So until the summer snow leopard for me. But look your mac can still run windows 7 pro, and Mountain lion with a few tweaks no problem.
http://osxdaily.com/2013/04/20/mlpostfactor-installs-os-x-mountain-lion-old-unsupported-macs/