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<h2>{{ .Title }}</h2>
<p>In using my secondhand MacBook Pro from 10 years ago, I finally took some warning signs seriously. MacOS had been reporting seriously degraded health since I first bought it, but frugality kept me from immediately replacing it. New replacement batteries cost about as much as what I paid for the whole computer (which of course is one of the reasons it was cheap).</p>
<p>But, popping sounds from the case, screws continually backing themselves out, and even shorter and erratic battery life over the last month finally prompted me to open it up. What I found wasn't pretty.</p>
<figure>
<img src="/static/media/MacBook_Pro/MBP_Uncovered_1000.jpg" alt="Insides of a mid 2015 A1398 MacBook Pro filled with dust, dirt, and a swollen battery." width="1000" height="750" />
<figcaption>Dirty MacBook.</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Aside from the grime, the first thing I really paid attention to was the swollen battery. There cells were puffed enough to push open the bottem cover when just one of the screws was removed. Not good.</p>
<figure>
<img src="/static/media/MacBook_Pro/MBP_Swollen_1000.jpg" alt="Profile shot of the battery highlighting the swollen cells." width="750" height="1000" />
<figcaption>Swollen cells.</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I found a replacement battery on Amazon for just under $70, so I wrangled my pride and bought it. After removing the bomb, I could now focus my attention on the fan noise. This turned out to be a few things, but it seemed like the fans were ramping up for pretty basic web tasks and especially YouTube videos. The first two things to check are blocked fans/cooling fins and thermal paste application.</p>
<p>The fans were able to spin, but not too freely, stoping shortly after "flicking" them. The left side fan was worse than the right.Aside from that, there wasn't too much dust blockage, just sediment coating the fan fins. Regardless, I pulled the heatsink, blew out the fins, and repasted the CPU & iGPU.</p>
<p>After booting back into macOS, I noticed slightly better temps, but the fans still kept ramping up while watching YouTube. After some searching, I found the main culprit. Ambient mode. This feature is supposed to make the letterboxing less noticeable by bleeding colors from the video into the black bars. While interesting, it's very compute intensive especially on old hardware that was already thermally challenged to begin with. Toggling that off brought the fans down immediately.</p>
<p>And that's about it. A reminder to maintain your hardware, especially when it comes to lithium batteries. Don't let things get to the point of disaster, which this well could have.</p>
<p>Happy computing.</p>
<p><b>Created:</b> {{ .Date }}</p>
</article>
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