I’ve had this old 1,1 macbook pro kicking around now for about a year. The thing has been beat up pretty bad. I clocked about a zillion lines of code on the thing, keys fell off, airport wifi thing blew up, dvd dead. I decided to at least replace the keyboard and stick linux on the thing and bring it back to some level of usable. I ordered the part from http://powerbookmedic.com and it took about a week to get here. Happy with their service, not so much with the USPS but whatever, it got here. So this morning I brewed up a pot of coffee and set out to re-animate the beast. Jump the break for the gory pictures.
Look at this poor thing. 4 keys missing, it’s all beer/coffee/dirt stained and stickered and drawn on, cracked and bent. I clocked a lot of code on it though. Dragged it all over the planet. It doesn’t owe me a thing. In fact, out of all the MBP’s I’ve owned, I liked this one best of all. I hate my new one. The glossy screen is total shite and the no button glass trackpad is total shite. Not happy Mr. Jobs. I’ll never buy another.
So anyway, the topcase is pretty easy to get off. Just take out every screw you can see and it falls apart basically. I fast forwarded through this helpful guide on youtube for how to get the keyboard yanked off the topcase. No problema. Reverse the steps and boom, up she boots. The only trouble I had was trying to get the backlight ribbon and keyboard ribbon attached. I had a few haemostats in the tool box and used a curved one with tape over the teeth to grab and push them back in.
So far so good. Back light works and everything so for $100 I am back in business with only 2 screws left over. Now, which linux, arch or debian… hmm…
