Thread by @swardley

X : Thanks for fixing my Mac book.
Me : My pleasure. The battery had burst, busting the keyboard and the trackpad. All replaced and fixed now. I also upgraded your OS to High Sierra and tweaked a few other bits.
X : Thanks. Any chance you can install windows 10 on it?
Me : No

X : Why not?
Me : Your mac book is over nine years old ... Apple tries its damned hardest to make you buy a new one and not have an upgrade path. To get windows 10 running, I'd have to hack bootcamp into giving you things it doesn't want, mess around with partition tables ...

... I mean, it's bad enough on physical hardware when the Macbook screams "tiny fiddly screws, why not buy a new one?" but bootcamp is usually all out war against old versions. Haven't been down the path for some time.
X : Please.
Me : No. Buy a PC. Use Ubuntu.

X : How much did the parts cost?
Me : About £80.
X : Installing windows is straightforward, at worst a few tweaks to the bios.
Me : Err ... Macs haven't used bios for a long time. UEFI. Here's a wonderful article on the topic - happyassassin.net/2014/01/25/uef…

X : Can't you just use bootcamp?
Me : Ok, enough with the Mac repair stories. Bootcamp is a really 'orrible piece of software which is magic when it's your friend and a git wizard when it's not. The answer usually involves a mix of gdisk, rEFInd and unetbootin.

Me : Ok, there you go. Macbook Pro 2010, all fixed and running windows 8.1. Even set you up a bootcamp like script.
X : Cool, so I can play windows games?
Me : Not graphic intensive ones.
X : But, it has got a Nvidia card?
Me : Oh god ...

Me : First, its graphic card is ancient. Second, Apple does its damn best to make windows performance suck on Macs, so it can claim MacOS performs better on the same hardware e.g. hiding the integrated graphics card from Windows etc. Apple is the Volkswagen of devices.

X : You don't like Apple?
Me : They're fine. Just remember they're focused on user needs but in that true junkie sense i.e. you're a "user" and they love you if you keep spending money but they're not about maintaining old kit or people who want to break the habit.

X : I wanted to play some decent games.
Me : On an decade old broken Macbook pro? Who do you think I am? Buy a decent PC with SSD (Samsung EVO), CPU (i7+), memory (Vengeance), board plus GTX 1080 & good cooling ... why the dewy eyes? No, I'm not building you a PC.