Laptop, Monitor Not Detected

[Vinny]

There has to come a point, surely, where you consider a new laptop, or even a new secondhand laptop.

Yes, when it is the cheapest or unavoidable option. As there is nothing mechanical left to die in the current one, that may be a (very) long way off.

The convenience of a stand-alone laptop is just not worth what it would cost beyond the £50 that the present "fix" has cost.

The keyboard was new, granted, but I am not burning the planet (or my cash) by thrwoing away a functioning laptop and buying a new monitor.

 

[Craig B]

Yes, when it is the cheapest or unavoidable option. As there is nothing mechanical left to die in the current one, that may be a (very) long way off.

The convenience of a stand-alone laptop is just not worth what it would cost beyond the £50 that the present "fix" has cost.

The keyboard was new, granted, but I am not burning the planet (or my cash) by thrwoing away a functioning laptop and buying a new monitor.

You need to knock on silicon when making statements like that, Vinny.

Have to agree with your sentiment though. Although I am into Mac 'puters for personal use, I've been keeping my old business class Dell notebook going since it was new in 2011. This is a 2nd gen Intel core i5 model that I only this past week installed a Kingston 240GB SSD in. Turns out the original HDD is 7200rpm, IIRC a special order option at the time, the speed of which is likely how I managed to make do for so long. Regardless, I couldn't resist putting one of these A400 series Kingston SSDs in, as the whole line has been dramatically discounted of late, with the best price in town now down to $24.99, only 3 bucks more than the 120GB model! After using Macrium Reflect Free to clone the HDD to SSD and popping the latter in, initial boot-up was almost as fast a what loading Excel used to take. I put the old HDD in an external USB3 enclosure and will continue using Macrium to maintain a clone as backup (in addition to all of my work related data being in sync'd 'secure cloud storage'). Regardless, what a screamer, and still with the original 2 x 2GB RAM in. Turns out, I've a compatible 2 x 4GB sitting here that came out of a Mac mini which should help keep the end up whilst multi-tasking heavier work apps, distributed apps, and the occasional VM (which this machine has managed to do all along, just). Knock on silicon, this old lap warmer should see me out, at least through my golden bungee cord semi-retirement period.

 

[mjw]

What he said. When the optical drive in my 2009 white polycarbonate MacBook died I watched a tutorial, put a small SSD in its place, doubled the RAM (to 4 LOL) and it flies along now. Cracks in the casing but I leave it at my parents flat to do their online shopping and banking.

 

[Craig B]

What he said. When the optical drive in my 2009 white polycarbonate MacBook died I watched a tutorial, put a small SSD in its place, doubled the RAM (to 4 LOL) and it flies along now. Cracks in the casing but I leave it at my parents flat to do their online shopping and banking.

Your mention of your parents using this for banking triggered a thought here. I've just this past month used the free dosdude1 patcher to install High Sierra (yes, I know) on my old MacBook Pro 2009*. Officially, this model only goes up to 10.11 El Capitan (same as your 2009 white MacBook). Running the last version of Safari on El Capitan my old MBP was starting to get a bit flakey on certain sites and the writing was on the wall wrt online banking in particular. After having little joy with alternative browsers that were compatible with El Capitan, I ended up going with dosdude1's High Sierra patcher as this is simple to install, everything works, and, most importantly, supports full graphics acceleration (not all patchers do for these old machines and macOS is virtually useless without). High Sierra also opened the door to installing newer and even more widely compatible browsers than Safari 13.1.2 (the last version that works with High Sierra), such as Edge, Chrome, Firefox, and my favourite, Opera.

Just thought I'd mention this as your folks could well get quite a few more good years out of your old MacBook yet.

* With SSD and 4GB RAM, yours will run Mojave or Catalina reasonably well, although take note of the known issues, such as 'Light Mode' artifacts that are mentioned within the instructional video for Catalina patcher in particular (may have been sussed by now) at http://dosdude1.com/catalina/.

 

[Darth Vader]

While we are thread crapping discussing old Mac computers I'd like to re-iterate that these old Apple machines can run Windows. I am writing this using a 2010 Mac Mini running Windows 11 Pro, Thing is I can also run macOS Ventura on this same machine under Windows and VMWare. It all helps to get more life out of quality working computers that have been deliberately made obsolete by Apple.

DV