Chosen Solution
Yay, I scored this 17" baby. It had been spilled upon, frying the keyboard, but operational; with remote keyboard. But very sluggish. Currently running, or better, dragging El Capitan. I am about to replace the keyboard (been there ,done that successfully before on other MBPs) Also would like to perhaps clean, (q-tip dap) the logic board stick sections, perhaps with alcohol. Is that a good idea? Finally, being a lover of OS10.6.8 on my various 2009 Macs , I am not sure what to do about the currently installed newer OS. Is it a good idea to run such a new OS on a 2010 processor, or should I wipe this off this machine and do a clean instal of and earlier OS? Finally, can I make a disc image somehow of the current OS, El Capitan, and save it for future tinkering? And can I save some of the programs currently installed, as disc images for future use on other restore projects? Update (01/02/2017) Yes, I am eternally grateful, a profound state of mind, I shall remain in. Thank you for the pointers. One other question remains regarding copying programs currently installed onto a USB, so I can reinstall them later when I wiped El Capitano off the machine and replaced him with my Snow Leopard. Is it possible to just copy the icon out of Application Folder into a USB drive, or are there extra steps needed to re-create a disc image to reinstall it elsewhere.
Go for the alcohol on logic board; just be sure to be using 80-98% isopropyl alcohol, and that all liquid evaporates before trying to use it again. Don’t use an anhydrous isopropyl alcohol, as it can do all sorts of funny and unpredictable things. I would run an older version of OS X, especially since what seems to be happening is Apple’s engineers decided to make each new version of OS X harder to run on older hardware to encourage people to upgrade to new devices. Yes, you can make a disk image, and make an OS X USB bootable using the instructions here: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/10/how…. I know, its’ for Mac OS X 10.1, it’ll work just fine with newer versions of OS X as well. When you download the new OS from the App Store, make sure that you QUIT the installer, which will open just after the download is finished.
Hi Jurgen, I saw your post so I thought I’d give you some encouragement. I have a 17" Mid 2010 i7 2.6G (6,1). It maxes out with 8GB Ram. I replaced the HD with a 1TB SSD - what a huge difference it made! I run the latest El Capitan available. I do a lot of Adobe LightRoom and Photoshop stuff. Sure, I suppose it could be a fraction of a second or two faster - but at my present proficiency level - I’d just be making mistakes faster. I also do a lot of Microsoft Office (For Mac) and was also running a VMware Virtual Machine running Windows XP. It had some of my legacy apps that won’t run on Mac (Visio and MS Project). I no longer use the VMWare - but it ran fine when I did. Mine is like new, well taken car of (pampered). I’d definitely max the memory out and get an SSD. The 17" Matte Screen is really tough to get these days in a laptop. Regards, Mark
