Woody is dead. Long live woody! (part 2)
The MacBook Air was indeed a nice host for woody. It ran without complaint and it was quiet. Interestingly, it did network transfers slower than I expected. I can’t believe it was the SSD (though I didn’t run a benchmark) so it must have been the USB ethernet dongle I was using.
The HP was attacked by my son and one of the things he found was a literal wall of dust in the exhaust fan (almost completely blocking it). With the dust removed, the chronic overheating issue was resolved. Then he was given another old laptop, an Acer Timeline X. He decided that he liked it better than the HP, so over the weekend we did some major shuffling.
- woody was moved back to the HP (which is cooler and quieter than before, but otherwise the same).
- The MacBook Air is once again running macOS. We have cleaned it up and hope to sell it to raise money for a GPU for my son’s gaming PC.
- I finally got around to moving the SSD in my MacBook out of the optibay and back into the regular drive bay, replacing the broken cable in the process. That job has been sitting in my queue for nearly 2 years now!
- The Acer was disassembled (it also had a wall of dust) and re-assembled with the optibay giving it extra storage.
- We took my son’s gaming PC to the store because the CPU or motherboard has failed (using both sticks of RAM causes errors in memtest, though each stick is fine by itself).
- I re-installed Windows XP on my gaming PC, since it turns out some of the old games I have (on disk) require SecuROM DRM to work. Good thing I kept those old drivers handy.
I mentioned last time that the SSD was complaining about errors. Well… I don’t know why but apparently Apple SSDs don’t work properly with SMART unless you’re running macOS. Both the MacBook Pro’s original SSD and the MacBook Air’s SSD come up with errors under Windows/Linux yet report as fine under macOS.