Laptop that made me a friend with the hardware
MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid 2012) with 2.9 GHz Intel Core i7 and 8 GB of RAM is my laptop since 2013. It opened to me the world of MacOS and showed that PC mouse is not a mandatory thing for laptop. But the biggest benefit which it gave me, I became a friend with the hardware and now I’ll tell you this story.
Mostly I used it for web surfing and working through Remote Desktop. It was extremely easy tasks for such kind of machine. Years come by and performance looked not so grate in compare to brand new laptops. So I should either buy a new laptop or made a research on what I can do with my Mac. This article highlights the answer ).
In general, there were only two options: change HDD to SSD and also update RAM. As for RAM, 8 GB was more than enough for my tasks. So I concentrated on SSD. I chose SanDisk Ultra 3D 250 GB (cost me around 65$). Now I have an opinion, that 120GB was enough and I could save half of this price (good news, I have managed to sell old HDD for 17$). Also, I have bought a USB case for 2.5-inch drives to clone MacOS and used one of the free cloning tools. The only thing to remember is that easier to clone drives with the same size and not every tool can clone the drive to a smaller one. 5 minutes and the laptop got a new life.
OS startup increased three times and now it’s around 20 seconds. General user experience becomes much better and I even enabled FileVault, previously it was not possible. Most interesting is that I haven’t noticed any difference with and without FileVault enabled. I’ll show two pictures with SSD read/write performance. And these results a bit strange because theoretically disk encryption should harm performance but we can see that numbers are inconsistent.
It could be the end, but in one or two months laptops become noticeable hotter under usage. I guess it was a mix of summertime temperature increase and more frequent usage after the upgrade. I dig dipper. Found amazing tool for monitoring: Intel Power Gadget. Made some stress tests, which showed that thermals weren't ok. Also, I have found that Apple does not start fans until the temperature hits the max. It helps to make noise level lower but makes laptop noticeably hotter.
The temperature curve shows that CPU temperature strikes to maximum very fast and even the fan’s max speed can’t help. So I tried to tweak the fan’s speed algorithm using Macs fan control application to boost speed, starting from 75 degrees.
The results weren’t any better. So I decided to clean the fan. Three more screws, 10 minutes overall and fan was cleaned. But the same story with thermal performance.
It meant that thermal paste doesn’t work well. I bought thermal paste, watched a couple of disassembling videos and everything was ready. At this point, my wife wanted to participate too. So she helped me with the screws and cleaned up the thermal paste. As we can see, the old thermal paste looked awfully.
After half an hour I was ready to run more tests with tweaked fan’s speed algorithm and new thermal paste.
It got better overall and doesn’t hit max immediately. Also, it started much more comfortable to watch series lying on the bed.
One more thing which I found is that it’s possible to make the laptop a bit lighter by removing the DVD drive.
I couldn’t feel any difference, so I put it back.
After all manipulations, mentioned above, I become a friend with the hardware. The only thing which I wanted to do but couldn’t is to upgrade the CPU. It is not possible to do because the CPU is soldered. Fortunately, I found a laptop, which required such a procedure and wrote a story about it.
