Obtained July 26th, 2023
This one's a bit of an issue currently. I bought it after like, a month of consideration, so not an impulse purchase like the others, and I did research on what year models had what capabilities and could run what OSes. I picked this one because of the Nvidia 9400M graphics making it able to run OSX 10.11 El Capitan, and all the way to modern macOS releases like Big Sur, Monterey, and Ventura (macOS 11, 12, and 13) with the use of OCLP. This in contrast with the 2008 and older models that stopped being updated after OSX 10.7 Tiger and lack support for modern MacOS patchers because of their Intel GMA graphics chipsets and/or 32-Bit architectures.
I recieved it in the mail yesterday (battery still in transit), plugged it into power, and it would make optical drive noises for a while. The pattern goes, two checks for a disk, automatic shut down and power back on, and then check disk three times before hanging with the indicator light on and the screen off. I'm used to the optical drive whirring from my other slot-loading Macs, everything from my G4 iBook to my 2011 iMac does that once when it's powered on or when it wakes from sleep, not five times with a shutdown in the middle. It never chimes, and the display never recieves any power or image. I took it apart to clean it and repaste the CPU and graphics, and it didn't really change anything, and neither did powering it on with the optical drive disconnected. It just made less noise.
While I fear the worst for this thing, that being graphics failure, I am told that white MacBooks are apparently pretty temperamental and finicky. They can have boot issues that occur if the machine's battery goes flat while it's sleeping, and need to have the thing reset. If the RAM configuration changes, it can also refuse to boot because of that. So I need to zap the PRAM. I could have sworn I tried that once already, but it's also possible the keyboard is faulty. I guess we'll figure that out when I get home from work today.
I haven't named this one yet, and I don't know if I will if I can't get it to boot. It might be as simple as a PRAM reset, or it could be a hardware fault that would require a logic board swap, I don't know yet.
UPDATE 1: November 12th, 2023
At the end of October, I decided that I was going to buy another of these laptops. After attempting to inspect the MLB from the previous mid-2009 MacBook and using my heat gun to reflow whatever might need it, the dead '09 remains dead. This one (which I'm typing this update from) was listed at a price of close to $60, and claimed to have a damaged optical drive. I sent the seller an offer of $50 with the intention of harvesting the optical drive from the dead '09 and installing Mavericks on it, and the offer was accepted. On November 2nd, it arrived, and I discovered some things about the laptop's condition.
First off, the optical drive worked fine, but it seems not to be aligned with the slot very well. When discs are ejected, they rub against the top of the slot, so it has issues with ejection. Secondly, when trying to install OSX Snow Leopard from the DVD I own, it would shut down seemingly at random. The first time, it shut down partway through the install process, and the second and third times, it shut down in the process of booting from USB. I pulled the hard drive and put it into my 2006 MacBook Pro, Dolores, just to get 10.6 installed onto the original 160GB hard drive from the dead '09, as the hard drive from this one was missing.
This install went well, and putting the hard drive back in the 2009, I discovered the laptop's actual issue. It was shutting itself down at random, of course. In Snow Leopard, it threw the "Are you sure you want to shut down your computer?" popup box constantly, and if left unattended it would shut down after a matter of minutes. As it turns out, the power button on the original keyboard was faulty. I tried swapping the keyboard from the dead 2009 onto it, and while the shutdown behavior disappeared, that keyboard sadly has four dead keys on it, and the delete/backspace key was one of them. It wasn't exactly a sustainable choice. The other three dead keys were plus/equals, seven/ampersand, and forward slash/question mark. So, I spent $20 on a replacement keyboard, and that arrived a few days later on the 6th.
It was the keyboard issue that gave this laptop its name. I had originally intended to name it Darling, as it would be a successor to Baby, my 2001 iBook G3. It was the shutdown behavior, which I jokingly referred to as "narcoleptic", that what gave me the inspiration to name it Aurora after the princess from Sleeping Beauty.
I did spend some time while the keyboard was in transit getting the OS upgraded to the officially supported maximum of 10.11 El Capitan, as the Mavericks installer I wanted to use was not offered by Apple for whatever reason. I'm sure I'd be able to find it if I tried hard enough, but I decided against it. I had to disconnect the keyboard deck from the machine to get it to sit through the updates without shutting off in the middle, or even to just download the install applications from Apple, but in the end I decided not to use MacOS on this laptop at all. The Chromium Legacy browser seems to disagree with something about this machine. Whether it's the small 2GB RAM capacity or the Nvidia 9400M graphics chip, the machine simply never rendered any graphics on the browser window. It would just load a white box, but the address bar still seemed to have the correct properties as the text selection cursor did appear when mousing over where it should be. My 2006 MacBook Pro with 3GB of RAM and Mobility Radeon X1600 graphics does not have this issue at all. This is when I decided to use Linux Mint instead.
It did take a bit to sort out the Broadcom wifi driver issues, but it just took installing the firmware with the firmware-b43-installer package, and then a reboot. Now evetrything is working wonderfully.
I've ordered a 240GB SATA SSD and a 4GB kit of 800MHz DDR2 to put in the laptop just to make it a bit snappier, hopefully. Those will arrive sometime in the middle of next week. Maybe at some point down the road, I'll order a larger kit of RAM, but high capacity DDR2 SO-DIMMS seem to be almost prohibitively expensive for whatever reason. While a 4GB kit made of 2GB sticks can be had for $12, an 8GB kit made of 4GB sticks can be found on eBay secondhand for anywhere between $40 and $100, which is insane to me. I've decided against that for now, instead keeping my biweekly fun spending down and focusing on saving money to leave Florida.
Maybe sometime next year I can put more RAM in it, but it's not a priority at all.
UPDATE 2: March 4th, 2024
Aurora has been sold on eBay for roughly $72 profit. I still have the broken 2009 MacBook, but the working one sold almost immediately. I played with putting macOS Monterey on it before reverting it back to El Capitan. I'll miss it, but I needed the money more than I needed the laptop.
Specs:
Cost to me: $167 (so far)