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ne0ngenisis · 10 months

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Let's talk about my BABIES

(in order of acquisition)

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Number One! ThinkPad T440p! (Not actually named)

This was a bit of an impulse purchase, as all of my laptops have been in the last threeish months. I knew of the trans girl stereotype of ThinkPads and Linux, and I wanted that. Especially because my laptop at the time was a crappy HP Stream (pictured underneath the ThinkPad) that couldn't run Windows without crashing constantly.

So I did some research and found out that this was the last model with socketed processors, and just kinda went for it! It arrived in much better condition than the pics suggested so I imagine the seller picked the wrong laptop out of the pile, but I'm not complaining.

It truly was nothing special when it was new, but I've upgraded it quite a bit since then! A 2C/4T 2.4GHz i3-4000M to a 4c/8t 3.7GHz i7-4800MQ, 16GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD! It took me about five hours to install and configure Arch Linux on here, and that was with the guidance of friends who are a lot nerdier than me and I actually cried like, twice, out of frustration... BUT, it's been a solid performer ever since.

It cost me about $170 after everything I've done to it, but I still need to replace the screen on it with a 1080p IPS model, because the 768p TN panel is now literally the worst laptop screen I own. Apple seriously had better ones 12 years before this.

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Number two! 12" iBook G3/500, "Baby"

Baby features in my current profile banner, as it's the laptop I carry around with me all the time to write on the go. The battery life is still pretty fantastic for its age, and it's super cute and small (the same depth as my ThinkPad not including the thicc battery, but about 2" narrower due to 4:3 aspect ratio).

I also picked this one up on a whim, because I was taken by an Apple hyperfixation, and also the image of a coffee shop hipster writing on an iBook. This one isn't a clamshell, love it or hate it, but I love it.

It's the very earliest model from 2001, with a 500MHz G3, 64MB of built-in RAM, and a CD-ROM drive. The original 10GB hard drive was missing so I went through the painstaking process of digging down to where it belongs and installing a 40GB IDE laptop drive I LITERALLY found in the trash.

I also spent $17 on a pair of working batteries and ended up with one that lasts for a good 4.5 hours when all you're doing is word processing, which I was and generally still do. Very close to factory battery life. I also spent about $16 on a charger because I didn't have one yet.

At first, I put Mac OS 9.2.2 on here, because it didn't have enough RAM for OS X as far as I could tell. Once I got the RAM upgrade (now 576MB, 64MB built-in + 512MB module), I installed OSX Tiger on here as well.

It's got some old OS9 games like Diablo II, Quake, Warcraft II, and I actually still own a physical copy of Riven on CD, so those all work on there. And I'm also using it to write, of course. However! It could not run Halo: Combat Evolved. Which led me to more purchases, lmao. I have considered doing a logic board swap to a faster CPU but that would be a daunting task...

It ended up costing me about $90, after the laptop, ram upgrade, charger, and working batteries.

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Number three! 14" iBook G4/1.07, "Ghost"

Ghost is a funny one. Also driven by impulse, in this case, to have an old Mac laptop that could play Halo. I actually received it on the same day as the next one on this list. This is a 2004 1.07GHz 14" iBook G4 with 256MB of built-in RAM and a 256MB module for a total of 512MB, and a combo drive, I believe. This one actually came with a 1GB module in it, and an Airport card, but I swapped some parts around to make my G4 PowerBook more usable.

It was incredibly cursed, including weird freezing and crashes, refusing to install updates and to mount USB devices, and then it just stopped seeing the hard drive all together. I took it apart twice, once to take the hard drive out to discover it was the original 40GB Apple branded hard drive, and another to put it back in once it started booting in my PowerBook G4 (number 4 on the list), and all the cursedness went away somehow!

I still named it Ghost in honor of the cursedness.

I don't have a good battery for it at this time. Right now the only working 14" iBook battery I have (which I paid like $35 for) lasts about an hour, and the 12" battery I have in there now dies at a seemingly random percentage around 60% because the battery isn't reporting its capacity correctly. I did design and order a 3D printed adapter bracket thing so maybe I can stop using fucking masking tape to hold the battery in. It may become more used than my 12" once I get the battery, entirely due to the larger screen and faster processor.

I did have to replace the F12 key, because the original one was missing. This was made a lot easier by having the PowerBook G4 which we'll go over next. Now it's like an accent escape key for a fancy mechanical keyboard, or a gold tooth!

This one actually cost me the least out of all of them, at $69, including the battery I'm not even using, and it came with a second charger, which is good! Though, I guess with the 3D printed battery adapter you can up that price to $80. Or lower it to $44 if the battery doesn't count!

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Number four! 15" PowerBook G4/1.33G, "Alice"

Alice was purchased just days later than my iBook G4, but showed up on the same day. And boy, she was a basket case. I have named her Alice because of "Al" being the elemental symbol for Aluminum, as she's a 2004 Aluminum PowerBook G4, with a 1.33GHz processor and 1.5GB of RAM. It originally came with 512MB of RAM in two modules, but I put in a 512MB stick I found in the trash, plus the 1GB module and the Airport card from the iBook G4 to make it a more usable laptop in the modern day.

The problems were immediate when I got it plugged in for the first time, as there was seemingly no display, until I noticed the dark screen started to change colors. There was a picture... there was just no backlight. To my surprise, the sketchy looking aftermarket battery actually worked fine still, and it was good for about 3.5 hours of use.

Getting it hooked up to an external display, I started to notice that the trackpad button didn't work either. It's a good thing these parts were cheap.

I actually tried fixing the backlight inverter myself, as the issue was there was a coil that had detached itself from the board. My jank soldering work lasted about 15 minutes before it made a buzzing sound and one of the little wire stubs came detached from the side of the coil. RIP.

A week or so later, the backlight inverter and trackpad cable show up, and me being able to actually use the laptop properly shows even more problems. It won't sleep when it's plugged in. But only when it's plugged in. I can't get into the boot picker. Five of the keys on the keyboard also don't work. As it turns out, all of these problems are keyboard problems, and that fixed all of them.

Basket case-ness is different from cursedness. I knew what parts needed replacing on the PowerBook. The iBook just misbehaved until it suddenly stopped misbehaving.

It cost me about $95, including the laptop itself, the backlight inverter board, trackpad ribbon cable, and a glorious (pure sex to type on) new-old stock keyboard.

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Number Five! Late 06 15" MacBook Pro, 2.16GHz C2D, "Dolores"

My MacBook Pro. As with the others, it was an impulse purchase, though it's required the most extreme repairs of any of these laptops so far. It's a Late 2006 15" model, with a Core 2 Duo T7400, and pre-upgraded to the maximum of 3GB of RAM and a 120GB SSD. It came with all sorts of goodies, including an 85-watt MagSafe charger, copies of iWork and iLife 2009, the original recovery DVDs for 10.4.8 Tiger, and a hard copy of OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard. What it did not include was a battery.

Initially I tried booting it up from nothing, and it would get stuck on a white or blue screen sometime after the Apple logo disappeared, and the same would happen when I put the Snow Leopard DVD into the drive. When I put the Tiger DVDs in, it would install the OS fine, but the resulting install wouldn't boot either. And then I noticed the artifacting.

I knew that this was a possibility with basically any model of pre-unibody MacBook Pro. All of them have graphics issues, though the '07 and '08 models have it a lot worse than the '06 models. I end up complaining about this on a Discord server, and another queer nerd tells me that the boot failure is probably because of the GPU being marginal, and since it's an ATI Radeon GPU instead of an Nvidia GPU, a reflow might help it.

So... I take it apart for the second time that day, after the first time to repaste the CPU, Northbridge, and GPU, and I bathe the GPU in 350°C air from my rework station for about 6 minutes, letting the board rest for 20 minutes before I reapply thermal paste again and reassemble it. Now it boots into MacOS fine. I installed Snow Leopard and updated to Lion, and it's been fine since, though the 32-bit EFI firmware has caused some issues with attempts to get Linux working on the damn thing, though I'm told the GPU could just be playing nice with MacOS but still not good enough to work in Linux.

I tried getting a battery off of eBay, a cheap replacement battery, but it only half works. It powers the laptop, but it won't show up in the OS to show any percentage or capacity, and it won't charge either. So I bought a single-use battery. I'm trying to message the seller and get my money back right now.

It has cost me about $74 including the cost of the crappy essentially single use battery. I'll probably get an actually good one from OWC eventually, because I want to be able to use this laptop as a daily at some point.

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Well, that's it! For now. I also have my eyes set on a mid 2009 white MacBook but that will be a later kind of thing. Not right now, while there's still work to be done on my other laptops.

#transgender #writing #ibook #macbook #apple #laptops #thinkpad #linuxuser #linux #powerbook #macbook pro

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