I found my old MacBook from 2008. The last time it was used, I was panicked, trying to use its battery to charge my phone via USB so I could call the coast guard, during Hurricane Harvey.
Needless to say, it had some water damage, and it ended up getting knocked about. I had a 2.5 SSD laying around, and a few YouTube videos came up about repairing the plastic era MacBooks, so I felt inspired. I opened it to see how bad it was, and it wasn't really that hurt--the screen has some weird water stains on the inside, but the CPU/RAM/etc all seemed fine, no rust, and they'd obviously dried in the 5 years since it'd been last touched.
So I bought a charger to see if it'd turn on, and it took a charge, and even made that old Mac chime, trying to turn on. No drive detected though, so I slapped in the SSD and installed Mac OS El Capitan, which is the latest OSX it can take. Sluggish, watery screen, and ran burning hot to the touch. Pretty much unusable.
So I took it back apart--starting with the battery, then the SSD, the brackets, and eventually the heatsink covering the CPU. I cleaned it with isopropyl, reapplied the thermal paste, put the cleaned heatsink back on, and picked up 2x4GB of really old RAM, to replace the 1GB stick. It ran SO much better--warm, but not painfully hot to the touch, and it could actually be used like a laptop, if you didn't mind all the smudges inside the screen.
I don't know exactly why I invested time into it--I'm not dire for a laptop, but there was some sort of therapeutic process of taking apart and reassembling something that was destroyed by the hurricane and then making it work again once more. I really had a good time with the whole deal.
I'm not sure how to repair the screen, if it's even possible with my skill level, or if I even want to, but it made me happy to get it back to usable.
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