[ale] Old MacBook (late 2008)

[Lightner, Jeffrey]

Someone gave me their old MacBook (late 2008) and over the weekend I played with it a little.   It has Intel Core 2 duo in it.

I noticed on trying to use Safari I got a complaint about it being old and not supported by whatever site I tested.

Reading suggests I have to upgrade OS X to get newer Safari.   The system isn't under support and when I told it to do the update it said there wasn't one.   More reading led me to the conclusion this unit will run a newer 10.6.x and maybe even a 10.7.x (Lion) but not the latest one.   It also led me to believe I'd need to buy more memory to run a newer OS X.

Did it tell me there was no update because:

a)      There is no support contract?

b)      There is insufficient memory?

c)       OS X upgrades cost money?

d)      It hates me?

I'm not really in the market for a MacBook and am only playing with this one because it was given to me.   It appears new ones are in the $2K range and I don't plan to spend that kind of money.   I might be willing to spend less money to upgrade RAM and even the OS X but am wondering if any of the Mac fans out there think it worth doing at all?

Also the battery (A1185) is kaput - I've seen 3rd party replacements on line for less than $50 where true Apple replacements are more than $100.   Is there any specific replacement folks would recommend?

By the way the existing battery is somewhat separated such that the plate one sees on the bottom of the laptop isn't flush with the bottom of the laptop because the housing in the battery is sprung.   I don't know if that is the case because of the old swelling issues batteries had in some things or if the previous owner simply dropped it.   I haven't tried to take it apart (though I did of course remove it from the laptop to see it is sprung) and wonder if there's any reason to try to fix this battery given its presumed age.   It operates just fine without the battery off of A/C power.

The reason it won't lock in the laptop is because of the sprung housing of the battery itself - the locking screw in the laptop does turn and pushes pins out that should lock the battery in place is working but where the pins would lock the batter into place is where the housing of the battery is separated from the bottom plate so it isn't locking.

Finally I did look briefly at Arch Wiki that seemed to suggest one could install Arch but it seemed to imply that one would do that in tandem with the OS X.   I didn't delve into that.   Can one simply replace OS X with Linux?   If so are there distros other than Arch?

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