12.7.4 on MacBook Pro 2008

I was told in some threads that this would be totally pointless and not worth my time. I listened for a while, but finally dug my heels in and committed.

One SSD swap, thermal paste change, fan cleaning, and new battery later, I have Monterey running on here and it’s extremely usable.

The paste change especially took this machine from a sluggish, howling loud, piping hot mess that would heat and heat until becoming unresponsive to a very fast, moderately warm at best, near-silent little machine.

Frankly I LOVE this MacBook. The style is my favorite Apple has ever made, the ports make doing anything I want so easy (especially photo backup to Apple photos from my digital camera) and now the laptop runs well enough to be my own personal 4K lossless plex server for the house.

I’m just over the moon about it, I remember trying to make El Capitan work with legacy software and dozens of hours of work, attempts at Linux, then falling back to MacOS before getting the patcher to finally work.