I hit up a recycler every odd week, and come away with boatloads of Intel-era swag. i7 Macbook Airs are rare as hen's teeth (but not quite as rare as ones with 16gb ram). My prize is a 2012 11-inch in 16/500 with an i7! (Talk about all the rare options in one package.) Pint-sized power! <tiger growl>
Good stuff! 😃 The HD 4850 is also the high-end GPU for the late 2009 27”, making it an incredible Snow Leopard machine for running the hundreds of old PowerPC games and applications readily available on Macintosh Garden!
That is a great suggestion, thanks Ming. I never paid much attention to MDS stores until you mentioned it. 👍
It is a good idea to relube the GPU at the same time. I have several old GPUs which had noisy fans but adding a bit of lube silenced them righ away. There is often a lube hole under the sticker on the fan. In some cases the fan blade assembly must be removed to gain access to the bearing.
In english: disable Spotlight.
sudo mdutil -a -i offsudo mdutil -a -i onMy memory is a bit hazy, but didn't you need Snow Leopard (Server edition) or some other flavor weirdness for 16bit? (I equally vaguely recall that getting Server running in a VM was a PITA, which is why I back-burnered it. --How many 32bit games do you have at Garden? I have several I could contribute. (The 32bit golden era peaked around 2012, just before a combination of Candy Crush mobile and Apple's incipient gatekeeping put everything else out of business.)
It’s actually very easy once you get it going. You can use Snow Leopard Server if preferred but Retail is fine. When you first try to run a PPC app it will ask if you want to install the Rosetta translation layer. From there it is automatically translated on the fly and there is little to no performance loss. I have not long played through Max Payne from 2002 (a Mac OS 9/OS X 10.2 PPC game) and it ran flawlessly on my 2011 MBP Snow Leopard partition. Your late ‘09 iMac also shipped with 10.6.1 so any retail 10.6.3 installer disc/ISO will boot and install just fine if you want to play around with that.
The combination of MDS_stores continuous writes and APFS skitter pattern jackhammers both rotational drives (you can audibly hear the read-write arm spasming constantly) and SSDs (due to extra wear-leveling), with the effect worsening with more recent versions of the OS relying more and more heavily upon it. (Vandalescence is an Apple specialty, with soldered drives holding boot-lock codes being a nicely cynical touch: such machines were explicitly designed with a limited lifespan.)
After carrying out the commands you guys mentioned, RAM usage at idle with one Finder window, Mail app open and Music playing is sitting at 3.7/8GB with zero swap or compression. Thanks again for the tip! 👍
The limitation I referenced might apply only to VMs.
32bit has been "officially" dead on Mac since Catalina, so it won't be long now. (Can you even buy the Mac desktop version of Peggle or Angry Birds anymore? ...If they're delisted on App Store, does that meet Garden eligibility?
Ah yes my apologies for not reading that properly, Snow Leopard in a VM definitely needed the Server version to work.
Ended up being £199.99 delivered, but the Trashcan will be mine!
Leopard and Snow Leopard work in a VM with the addition of a version plist file.
I have a 2013 Mac Pro that I found in a recycle bin for free. It's the midrange model with the D500 GPU. It works perfectly and honestly I still cannot believe how much I like it. I don't often even use it but when I take the time and hook it up it really is sooooooo cool to use. I love all of the cool touches like how it lights up the ports when you slightly turn it or how super quiet it is. I also have an M1 Mac mini and the Mac Pro feels fast like the M1. You can tell that Apple spent a lot of time designing this machine, even if they messed up the thermals on it. They really tried hard to make something special.
With the whites, you'll need at least 4gb for Mojo. (Technically it can run in less, but there would be almost nothing left for anything else to launch. I'd really love to locate that extra gig of hidden crap in the OS between ElCap and Mojave, and get rid of it.) --And keep that mini, those are coming back in demand as hdmi movie servers.
Also, IIRC, you need at least a core2duo processor (early 2008?) to run Mojave with ANY patcher. Also remember that Mojave will default clean-install into APFS, so you'll want to (eventually) CCC5-clone it to HFS+ for use on rotational drives (note that the 005 security update will not install unless you're in APFS, so do all that first).
I have been using mine for some time now and I am quite happy with it and running native Monterey.
You sure about a 16 GB RAM option for the Intel Airs? Can't find any reference for this (Mactracker, Apple).
There are no Intel Airs with 16GB, except the odd custom job that I've seen mentioned on here. Certainly no factory 16GBs.
I'll relook at my collection (I have shelves full of MBs).
