- Today, we are taking trash laptops and turning them into
fully functional setups. As long as your definition of fully functional is
a little bit flexible. This is a laptop that a friend
of mine recently gave me, which is, well, has a few issues and that really got me thinking, odds are you probably
have some old computer, some old laptop in your life that's either broken or old and obsolete. So today we have a very simple mission, to turn junk into treasure, to turn something old and busted into something new and shiny. Well, maybe not shiny, but at least it'll work and be better. So this is some model
of a 15-inch MacBook Pro and it has some pretty major issues. So there's no trackpad,
the battery has bulged so you can see that the entire, I mean, the entire chassis moved
up by like half an inch. I also believe that we're
missing some components in the inside. You got another laptop? We already have a laptop that we're doing the video on the MacBook. Is this a laptop without a screen? - Yes. - No RAM, no storage, no wifi,
Bluetooth card, no battery. I'm gonna be really mad
if this was expensive. Look, I'm all about trying to
turn trash into treasure here, but like I have to have
something to work with here. Here goes nothing. I wonder what happened, the way it looks like
the battery expanded, I bet it like pushed the trackpad out. Remember to keep talking
and nobody explodes. - I have no idea. - Wooh, God, I don't even
wanna touch that thing, look at that. So when it comes to the Dell, even though it's missing
so many components, for our project, we can actually turn this thing
back to life pretty easily. All we do is grab a couple
of SODIMM modules, DDR4, grab an SSD, even like a 240 gig SSD and plug this guy into ethernet and we have what should
be a usable desktop, but the MacBook, I think the MacBook is going
to be the trickier thing. So we have the ability
to fix this as a laptop, but what I think will make more sense is if we turn it into an iMac. We attach it to like a cinema display or we attach it to some kind of monitor and we turn this old, broken laptop into something which you
can still use today in 2020. Now, mind you, I don't know
how good it's gonna be, but there's some pretty
easy upgrades we can do to give this Mac a lot more longevity. And so we have all the parts
to rebuild our MacBook, including the monitor and
the memory and everything, but before we can get to that, let's actually take this apart. First of all, we're going to be replacing our 750
gig hard drive with an SSD, we are going to replace our
four gigs of RAM with eight, and we're going to be
removing the optical drive in favor of a data doubler to give us an additional
five terabytes of storage. - [Ken] You don't need your
optical drive on an older Mac and wanna replace it
with an SSD or hard drive this is what you use. - While I'm in here, I'm
definitely going to clean it out. It's actually not in that bad shape, but it's a little dusty and any time you're taking apart a laptop, especially something like this,
which is what, 10 years old, it always makes sense to
tidy and clean what you can. This, this, we do not need it anymore. (air whooshing) - [Ken] Oh, that was a cool sound. - So inside this tiny hard drive, we will be adding five terabytes
of space to our MacBook. Now is this too thick to fit? Maybe, 'cause that's a
thick hard drive, wow! - [Ken] Oh, that's really dense. - I don't think that's
going to fit it all, there's no way that, no way. So that's roughly how much it sticks out. - [Ken] Oh, that's fine, that's okay. - Inside this box we have what should be the original cinema display for this particular MacBook. So from the front, it
looks a lot like an iMac, however, we actually have
a interesting selection of ports available. We have a MagSafe which will power your
MacBook via the display, we have a mini DisplayPort, which will provide the video feed, then you have a USB which is able to run not only our webcam,
but also around back, we have three USB 2.0 ports, I believe. So theoretically, this is
like an all in one solution before you had something
like Thunderbolt 3 which will do it all via a single cable. - [Ken] So I mounted my books, all of the fans have a
little bit of clearance. There's some air channels that will allow for some ventilation, I think, I think. - You think it will be fine? - It should be okay. - I guess it's already alive. So your Mac might not be quite as much of a challenge as ours. However, you'll likely find the sponsor of today's video very
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CleanMyMac X at the link in the description and
huge shout out to them for sponsoring this slightly
questionable idea for a video, thanks guys. (air whooshing) Step one is going to be getting our Dell
laptop up and running. So we have a wide variety
of parts to try and do this, "as cheaply as possible" and
by as cheaply as possible, I mean probably the same price as if we bought a working Dell, but this one's going to be cooler as long as you don't
care about the aesthetic. First step, we need to get the
actual laptop up and running because it has been so
thoroughly stripped, it's never going to be portable again. So instead, what we're going to do is install some RAM
since it literally needs that to function. All right, next, let's install an SSD, which I have a 240 gigs SATA SSD, perfect. (Austin laughs in a questionable manner) I'm sure that'll stay. Secure. Look, it's at the desktop, we're not even gonna shake it like that. Okay, okay, okay, calm down, calm down. - It's fine, we did it. - I'm so much lead up
for the word, it's fine. So rightfully you might be asking, why are you doing this project? Which is an excellent question
that I have no answer to, but secondly, you may also be asking, how are we going to get around the fact that you have no screen? Well, we're going to attach it to the back of this Dell monitor. We picked a Dell monitor
purely because it matches and we wanted to keep with our Dell theme. - [Ken] I call dibs on this monitor after. - Well, if you take the monitor, you're gonna have to
take the whole computer. - [Ken] Sure. - Okay, cool. Oh, Ken Bolido, what a smart idea! No wonder you get paid the big bucks. - I do? - [Austin] No wonder you
should get paid the big bucks. What is that? The cooling pad? No, no, no, no, look how clean this looks, we can't ruin it with a cooling pad. This looks-- - Clean. - [Austin] Wait, let's
bring the monitor down. - It's clean, it's clean, look, look, we can get the rotation
too, look, look, look. It's totally-- - [Austin] Fine, fine. - You have your cooling,
you have your cooling. You also have this Keychron
K2 which is a choice. - [Austin] Can I just ask, was the Keychron K2
keyboard more expensive than our laptop itself? - 85 bucks. - [Austin] Oh, not more expensive, but still more expensive
than everything else, got it. - Yes, Keychron K2 is probably
the highest quality thing we have in this setup. I like the yellow button. - [Austin] That's orange, that's orange. - Sorry, I can't color. - [Austin] You okay. - No. - [Austin] Do you need a doctor? - I need help. - [Austin] What kind of help? - A lot. - [Austin] That's a great answer. So today has gone very interestingly. So when we came into
the studio this morning, we're like, okay, let's
finish shooting the video. We've made it as far as we can. So we figured we would just plug it in and show what it would look like if it was actually functional and at that point, it decided to turn on, I was able to install Windows
and is now fully flawless. So everything shows up, I didn't even realize our
quad core i5 processor. So we have a 6440 HQ, we
have our 16 gigs of RAM, our SSD, everything shows up here, absolutely no problem. Now on the MacBook side, okay, so there's good
news and there's bad news. The good news is it is working, so after a little bit of driver trickery, we have not only everything showing up, so we have our 15 inch MacBook. When we first installed High Sierra, which is the highest OS
this will actually support, the graphics were not working, we actually had to manually
force those Nvidia graphics on. These were known to have
issues, not only for failures, but also just the drivers are old, I guess would be the best way to put it. However, by forcing
those Nvidia drivers on, it's not like we need
battery life or anything, it now works no problem. And we of course have it
connected to our cinema display. Now, looking at these two systems, a very legitimate question is why? Now, when we started this video, the idea was we really wanted to show you that if you have an old laptop, or you able to pick
something up for cheaper or as a hand-me-down or whatever, there's real value to
them and that is true. These are both fully functional setups that are much, much less expensive than anything new that you would get and both I would say are completely usable based on your actual needs. However, the way we've done it,
maybe not the greatest idea, the five terabyte hard drive that we put in the MacBook doesn't show up because I don't think it's supported, so questionable decision. The cinema display actually looks great so it has not only the
power for the laptop, but we also have our mini
DisplayPort and USB, that's all great, but the problem is as it
resets for some reason, 'cause I touched the cable, this was a $500 display and
it came with a chip on it. So look, it looks great,
it is very well supported, but at $500 you probably
could have just got an iMac. Out of the two setups, this one's probably the more usable. We have a quad core
processor, 16 gigs of RAM, but the thing is the actual laptop itself was just too expensive. Considering that it was
basically just a motherboard and nothing else. It's not necessarily the greatest. This Dell monitor is great, obviously your peripherals
and stuff that you wanna do, but we had to spend a fair
bit of money on an SSD, on memory, all that kind of
stuff to get up and running. - [Ken] So don't buy these laptops if you have them laying around, yes. - Thank you very much for watching. Make sure to subscribe
and definitely be sure to check out our wonderful sponsor, CleanMyMac X at the
link in the description and I'm gonna go find
something to recycle now. I think we've reduced and reused enough. We've got to keep that
virtuous circle, circling. (upbeat music)
