Tuesday, March 18th, 2025
Leaky Capacitors, Many Macs, and Crazy Wind.
Shamrocks probably don't taste good.
Happy St. Patrick's Day!
That was yesterday, if I’m not mistaken. St. Patrick just so happens to be one of my many favorite saints, and happens to be the Patron Saint of the Diocese I’m in. St. Patrick, pray for us!
Happy St. Joseph’s Day!
That will be tomorrow. I checked. St. Patrick’s was yesterday, today is the 18th, and tomorrow is St. Joseph’s.
ABit Leaky
A while back I’d bought a PC at a yard sale for 15 dollars (add link here). It wasn’t in very good shape, and I had no real idea as to what I’d bought until I got home. Turns out it was a Socket A-based machine, with a Athlon XP 2500+, 1GB of RAM, and a ABit KD-7 board that was in terrible shape. It had leaky capacitors left, right, up, down, and even center. So I decided to take the board out of the machine to get a closer look.
The board. Look for the leaky capacitors.
There's around at least 30. I've circled them so you can see. Hard to notice the bulging but it's there.
Meaning that I need to replace a lot of the ones on the board. The poor thing can’t even load Windows XP without crashing due to being too unstable. It’s a project for another day, as I need to get the stuff to properly remove the bad ones and add new ones.
Inventory Management.
I ended up getting frustrated with using HomeBox for my inventory (I think I have mentioned using HomeBox in the past). I decided to switch over to Snipe-IT instead, and it’s been much better for my kind of inventory, as I can have a lot more details on a item and assign statuses and the such. Very useful to keep track of what I have that is broken and the such.
More Macs.
I ended up with two more old laptops, this time two MacBook Pros (and thank you to the kind person who gave them to me.). Both appeared to have been quite heavily used, but that really doesn’t matter to me as much as the actual device itself.
They both looked to be the same model, but on the inside they are quite different (at least in terms of specs). One of them was a mid-2010 base model 13-inch MacBook Pro, and the other a Late 2011 base model 13-inch MacBook Pro. They also need a thorough cleaning of the ports and insides at some point, something which I thoroughly enjoy doing.
The two MacBooks sitting on a table.
Both devices did power up. However, it appeared the 2010 one had OS X El Capitan 10.11 installed. I presume the device has been unused for a while, as El Capitan is not the latest for this device (High Sierra, 10.13 is the latest for both). It looked like someone had a attempted reset of the OS, as it loaded into a installer, which promptly crashed while telling me no packages were eligible for install. I tried to boot the thing off of my OS X Lion USB, but it too would not take it. I ended up having to reset the PRAM (option+command+P+R on startup), boot into the Lion installer, and reinstall OS X. After that, the device turned out to be fully functional.
The 2011 MacBook Pro needed to be wiped, so I went ahead and wiped it, and installed Lion with no problems. It too turned out to be a fully functional device, save the crack in the screen, which is not super noticeable during normal use. I’ll probably leave it there since new glass is out of my price range. I ended up putting a SSD and 16GB of RAM in the device, reinstalled Lion, dual booted that with High Sierra, then attempted to install Sequoia using OpenCore Legacy Patcher. I did manage to get it to work, but since I wanted to keep High Sierra, I had to add another volume to the APFS disk. The Sequoia installer did not like it, so I tried to install a patched Catalina instead. That worked, and installing Sequoia on top of that worked perfectly.
The 2010 MacBook Pro "bonding with nature". More like it was placed on a ladder next to a tree. Apple devices are very photogenic. Wind It’s quite dusty and windy outside. It looks like there’s a chance of Mars too, as it’s getting quite dusty. The wind has been on and off the past couple weeks. Doves. Smartie came over to my desk and sat with me for a while last week. Smartie the dove looking at the camera.