Late 2009 MacBook 13”

[NineEyeRon]

My parents had this thing, they had not used it in about three years as it was feeling a little slow.

 

I offered to take a look at it as my sister wanted to use it to write her CV but it struggled to open a Pages document.

 

When I tried to start it the thing took about 10 minutes to even be in a place where I could move the mouse.

 

In the spirit of family I pulled the 500GB SSD out of my PC and cloned across the 220GB drive. I would have used my old 129GB drive but every byte of that 220GB drive was in use and it would have been impossible to delete anything in the condition it was in.

 

I had never cloned anything before, this was new. It took a while, even with both drives connected by SATA cables to my PC. It was a success, when I put it in the macbook it booted wonderfully and I could set about cleaning it!

 

I found over 15k of photographs, stored in at least two places. First thing I did was back up all the photos I could to my NAS. Then I got the iCloud working and moved all their docs to iCloud. I ran a duplicate photo finder as well as deleting photos in a second Apple Photo Library AND in the old iPhoto program.

 

I managed to rescue all their photos, remove all the duplicates to take it down to 9k photos AND reduce the disk usage to under 100GB with all their photos, videos and programs on it and with everything backing up to iCloud.

 

So now ALL their photos and videos fit onto their iCloud, the MacBook is clean and running well. I did try to find a 250GB hard drive but the places we went were all sold out and the other places we could have gone would have taken too much time (had my toddler with us and he gets tired).

 

Thankfully they agreed to buy the SSD off me so I have another one on the way soon, with all the success I had cloning I fixed my father in laws laptop with my 128GB SSD. I will put my nice new 1TB SSD in my PC later this month

 

I did this over the course of about 3 days as I tried some things that didn’t work and the backups took ages due to slow transfer speeds.

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Now I admit I know very little about modern Macs (2009 is modern as I am used to pre-2000 macs), does anyone have anything else I need to do? Its all updated to High Sierra now and runs buttery smooth (better than new my mother said!)

 

I don’t want to pay £10 for a duplicate photo program that won’t do any better than its free version. Is there anything else to do?

 

If not that’s great, I thought you might like the little story

 

BTW the windows laptop didn’t speed up so good but it has a terrible processor and a keyboard that is failing so I guess those are holding it back as much as the old HDD was.