rampancy
macrumors 6502a
In today's episode of dumpster diving with rampancy...
Since the A1181 from Hell two years ago I haven't had much luck at the electronics recycling bin in my mother's condo. But within the space of a month, I snagged a 2012 (?) Mac mini dropped off at a Little Free Pantry at my work, and at other electronics recycling bins at cat sits, a perfectly working Asus VivoBook from 2019 (all it needed was DDR4 RAM and a SATA SSD, because of course that was what got harvested from it)...and a fully working Late 2009 iMac 10,1, upgraded to 8 GB RAM.
When I got the machine, the first thing that confronted me was the sluggish hard drive; what came next was a desktop and display full of the previous owner's complete life: Texts synced via iMessage, emails discussing investments, personal photos...I wasn't trying to snoop, that's just what automatically launched when I got to the desktop (which I got into thanks to the login password, which the previous owner just put into the password hint). Needless to say, I completely wiped the hard drive - but not before I had to go scrounge up a USB keyboard at a Value Village, because my Bluetooth keyboard on hand didn't support a wired USB data connection. (It's a real head trip let me tell you, being a dirty Anglo from Ontario using a keyboard with a French Canadian layout.) - to complete the aesthetic, I added a jaundiced-yellow Microsoft mouse with a scroll wheel half-degraded into raw petroleum, also harvested from the recycling bin.
Thanks to Apple's deliberate negligence, I realized even reinstalling from the local recovery volume was broken. It took me at least four hours of searching, downloading and redownloading and re-redownloading the OS X 10.13.6 installer to make an installer USB (I wanted to at least do a clean install of High Sierra before attempting dosdude1's Catalina Patcher), poring over YouTube tutorials and forum posts, installing various bootable USB creator apps...only to discover that making a bootable install USB for High Sierra was impossible on my M2 MacBook Air. After cursing Apple to high heaven, I got MX Linux. In just 20 minutes, from me downloading BaleenaEtcher and the ISO to finishing the install, I had a fully working computer. I didn't even need to install firmware for the iSight, or fumble around with proprietary WiFi drivers. Everything just worked out of the box. No muss, no fuss.
There's still some work to be done: The 500 GB hard drive is getting on its last legs and will eventually have to go - thankfully it won't be as arduous as replacing the dead hard drive on my Late-2013 iMac. But apparently dealing with the temperature sensor may be tricky. For now though, everything just works, and I'm more than happy with that.
Since the A1181 from Hell two years ago I haven't had much luck at the electronics recycling bin in my mother's condo. But within the space of a month, I snagged a 2012 (?) Mac mini dropped off at a Little Free Pantry at my work, and at other electronics recycling bins at cat sits, a perfectly working Asus VivoBook from 2019 (all it needed was DDR4 RAM and a SATA SSD, because of course that was what got harvested from it)...and a fully working Late 2009 iMac 10,1, upgraded to 8 GB RAM.
When I got the machine, the first thing that confronted me was the sluggish hard drive; what came next was a desktop and display full of the previous owner's complete life: Texts synced via iMessage, emails discussing investments, personal photos...I wasn't trying to snoop, that's just what automatically launched when I got to the desktop (which I got into thanks to the login password, which the previous owner just put into the password hint). Needless to say, I completely wiped the hard drive - but not before I had to go scrounge up a USB keyboard at a Value Village, because my Bluetooth keyboard on hand didn't support a wired USB data connection. (It's a real head trip let me tell you, being a dirty Anglo from Ontario using a keyboard with a French Canadian layout.) - to complete the aesthetic, I added a jaundiced-yellow Microsoft mouse with a scroll wheel half-degraded into raw petroleum, also harvested from the recycling bin.
Thanks to Apple's deliberate negligence, I realized even reinstalling from the local recovery volume was broken. It took me at least four hours of searching, downloading and redownloading and re-redownloading the OS X 10.13.6 installer to make an installer USB (I wanted to at least do a clean install of High Sierra before attempting dosdude1's Catalina Patcher), poring over YouTube tutorials and forum posts, installing various bootable USB creator apps...only to discover that making a bootable install USB for High Sierra was impossible on my M2 MacBook Air. After cursing Apple to high heaven, I got MX Linux. In just 20 minutes, from me downloading BaleenaEtcher and the ISO to finishing the install, I had a fully working computer. I didn't even need to install firmware for the iSight, or fumble around with proprietary WiFi drivers. Everything just worked out of the box. No muss, no fuss.
There's still some work to be done: The 500 GB hard drive is getting on its last legs and will eventually have to go - thankfully it won't be as arduous as replacing the dead hard drive on my Late-2013 iMac. But apparently dealing with the temperature sensor may be tricky. For now though, everything just works, and I'm more than happy with that.