How to improve the MacBook 2007

shadowbyte · April 17, 2016

This guide probably applies to the MacBook Pro (core 2 duo) models around this era as well as other macbooks.

Alright, here we go.

So recently, I picked up an old Core 2 Duo Macbook (A1181) from a friend for 50 dollars.

http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook/specs/macbook-core-2-duo-2.0-white-13-late-2007-santa-rosa-specs.html

The battery needed to be replaced, it desperately needed more RAM (it has 1GB), and it was covered in what I hope was tomato sauce (but you never know ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)). I managed to get the mac for 50 dollars, which was pretty good.

There are a myriad of aftermarket batteries available for this model macbook, but check carefully to make sure that the battery is compatible. Note that these aftermarket batteries aren't going to last as long as the OEM apple model, but you'll still get a decent amount of time off one. One thing that these old macs don't have is enough RAM. This one came with 1GB, which barely cut it for Leopard, and definitely not for Lion. I picked up 4GB of DDR2 667 off eBay for 20 dollars, which improves the experience greatly for cheap. There is unofficial support for 6 gigs of RAM, but it's super expensive for a minimal performance increase.

Once I cleaned the (tomato sauce??) off the mac, installed the new RAM (4GB DDR2 667) and replaced the battery, I tackled the software side. My friend had never updated the laptop past OSX Leopard 10.5.8, which supports very few modern apps (adobe CC, steam, google chrome), so I updated the thing to OSX Lion 10.7.5, the last OS supported by this model. (you can buy an OSX lion download off apple's store here, or, if you don't have another mac to download the dmg with, check eBay for Lion disks and USB drives.

Once I got my copy, I booted from the Lion USB drive (guide here), wiped the mac's hard drive, and installed Lion. Now with Lion on the mac, I had the ability to run Windows through BootCamp (guide here). Since I had a spare Windows 7 disk lying around, I installed Windows 7 Professional in a bootcamp partition with lion. I bought the key off Kinguin.net, which I can definitely recommend for cheap windows keys (I got lion for 20 dollars from apple, and Windows for 24 dollars off Kinguin).

During the BootCamp process, you have to create a driver disk so you have full functionality in Windows. When I went to go install the drivers from the disk in Windows, I got this

This dialog is actually fairly common when running BootCamp on older Macs, and I found an amazingly helpful guide on how to bypass this.

http://blog.iphoting.com/blog/archives/830-Boot-Camp-on-Older-Intel-based-Macs.html

Props to this guy for helping me through this install.

Anyway, now you should have your mac up and running with Windows and OSX. There are some great support threads online if you get stuck, since chances are other people have run into similar issues.