Not really Vintage, But still cool

[kite210]

Recently I started working at the same shop I got my Power Mac G3 B&W from, and my boss had a Macbook that he couldn't get to boot up.

He had the restore discs for it (They were Tiger discs) and we tried several times to get it to boot from the discs, but it always said it was missing the OS. He thought it was the optical drive and decided to sell it to me for just $50 dollars. I agreed and took it home. I didn't have any retail copies of OS X x86, so I figured what the heck, I'll try my Hackintosh disc.

I put that in and it booted up and installed perfectly, so I purchased Snow Leopard and installed that and have been using it for about a week now.

Here are the specs:

Intel Core 2 Duo "Santa Rosa" @2.2Ghz

1 GB 667Mhz DDR2 RAM

120 GB Hard Drive (Upgraded to 320GB)

13.3 inch WIdescreen Display

Intel GMA X3100 GPU W/ 128Mb of shared VRAM

The battery that came with it was dead so I ordered a new one from amazon and it should get here by the 3rd of march.

It's got some scratches on the outside and a few tiny cracks in the polycarbonate casing, but nothing to serious.

For being the first intel mac I've owned, I'm very impressed. It may be an older model MacBook, but it's still surprisingly quick(can't say that about PCs from 2007).

Anyway for $50 USD I got a macbook that is still being sold used for around $500-$600 at several online resellers. :beige:

 

[protocol7]

Nice score! I have the model before that (GMA950) and it runs Snow and even Lion just fine. Not much use for games though, but that wasn't what I bought it for anyway. You should bump up the RAM when you get a chance. I'm not sure if the limit on those is 3GB or 4GB. On mine I think it's 3GB (a chipset limitation). I have 2GB in mine.

 

[kite210]

The limit for mine is 4Gb, according to apple, But it can actually take 6Gb, according to MacTracker.

It's really nice for certain games, Mainly Sim City 4 as I am a huge fan of Sim City.

 

[kite210]

I just received my battery today, went with a 3rd party one, but it has a capacity of 3 hours and 30 minutes, which is pretty good for me. :beige:

 

[coius]

If you have an apple store nearby, take it there. I told my friend about it (his is a mid-2006 model) to take his macbook in (it was cracking even under warranty) and they replaced dang near every plastic part. Looked like it was new.

Apple doesn't advertise it knows this, but it silently acknowledges the plastic issues. I handed my friend a list of people discussing the issue hoping to arm my friend just in case they object. They didn't even ask him, took the book and 2 days later had it. I was surprised at how good it looked. Not a scratch or crack ANYWHERE.

All free!

It seems apple had a silent recall, they won't tell people about it, but they won't fuss if you take it in.

So take yours in. 99% bet, you will have your cracked plastics replaced for free.

Awesome score. Btw, I bought a blackberry storm 2 on ebay in near-mint condition for $150. Not bad considering the rest of them on ebay were going for close to $200-$280 and most of those were either heavily cosmetically damaged, or just plain don't work and look beaten up.

Oh, and then there's the server...

~$350 shipped to the door with a dual core opteron, 2GB ECC RAM, dual 80GB HDDs (replaced with 160 because one of the 80GB died) 2x 1TB HDDs, PCI-X RAID card (coming in the mail) that is TRUE RAID (not fakeraid/bios assisted raid).

It's happily running on a rack in my room, and is just awesome.

So we both kind of scored decent deals

anyways, congrats! Hope you have a lot of fun with it.

Btw, I really would recommend 2 or 4GB as dual channel if you can. The dual channel really helps with the video graphics. I saw a huge performance hit in frame rate on World of Warcraft going from 2GB (2x 1GB) to 3GB (1GB, 2GB) dropping by as many as 20 frames/sec on the low settings. So that dual channel really helps when doing video graphics.

Also, upgrade that drive. 500GB drives are going cheap and are much faster/better/newer than the drives apple shipped with those. Mine was dog-slow and when I ugpraded the drive to 320GB, it took off (I installed a 7200RPM HDD in it).

Ditto on my macbook pro. The original 250GB (5400RPM) to 320GB 7200 RPM took read write speeds from a max of 60/40MB/s up to between 80-90/60MB/s and seek time/latency was awesome. Loaded apps quicker, OS loaded quicker and everything!

 

[kite210]

Yeah unfortunately the closest apple store around here is a 45 minute bus ride(since I don't have a car) to the northwest side of town(I live on the south side of milwaukee). I'can't remember what speed the drive I put in was, but it is a lot faster than the stock 120GB drive that came with it.

Thanks for the tip about paired ram, since I was going to replace one of the 512Mb sticks with a 2GB stick, looks like I'll have to find a second stick lol.

On an off-topic note:

Since I got the MacBook, I've had my Power Macintosh G3 B&W running SETI@Home non stop for about a week now, and its completed 3 tasks now.

 

[bizzle]

It's not a recall. When a product is recalled and repaired or replaced it's not repaired or replaced with the same defective part. Your top case will crack again. And again. And again. A recall is also typically for safety issues. Your cracked top case isn't going to kill you.

 

[LCGuy]

The limit for mine is 4Gb, according to apple, But it can actually take 6Gb, according to MacTracker.

I can confirm that the limit is indeed 6GB - I have 6GB (1 4GB + 1 2GB module) installed in mine, and it works perfectly...really a very nice machine.

Have to say, it does disappoint me a bit when I set up a brand new MacBook for someone at work, upgrade the RAM to 4GB, and remember that thats as far as they go...while my 4 year old MacBook (which is considered "obsolete" at work) is rocking with a full 6GB.

 

[kvanderlaag]

Have to say, it does disappoint me a bit when I set up a brand new MacBook for someone at work, upgrade the RAM to 4GB, and remember that thats as far as they go...while my 4 year old MacBook (which is considered "obsolete" at work) is rocking with a full 6GB.

Pardon? The current generation of MacBooks max out at 8gb. (2x4gb PC3-8500).

 

[LCGuy]

Hmm, just checked OWC's website..you are indeed correct! I'd never heard of anyone putting 8GB in a polycarb unibody so I assumed they actually did max out at 4GB.

 

[kite210]

It's not a recall. When a product is recalled and repaired or replaced it's not repaired or replaced with the same defective part. Your top case will crack again. And again. And again. A recall is also typically for safety issues. Your cracked top case isn't going to kill you.

I'm not really worried about the top case, since it's barely noticeable.

At this point I know that you can't get a used apple laptop in pristiene condition, unless you pay an arm and a leg for it.