Should I upgrade my OS?

"Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing." (granfury)
10/11/2015 at 00:20 • Filed to: None

I’m tempted to upgrade the OS on my early 2008 2.4GHz MacBook Pro. The computer is supported, but I wonder how it will perform. I can’t find any solid information as to how well it will work on this old machine, but past experiences with newer OSes than Snow Leopard on my Late 2009 Mac Mini weren’t encouraging, although I haven’t tried El Capitan on the mini.

Some people running the beta said that the performance was better than Mavericks or Yosemite. I’ve run Mavericks on the mini and found it functional, but a test of my patience compared to Snow Leopard. I generally try to keep the OS the same vintage as the hardware for performance reasons. I did have a friend that bought a nice Mac Pro back in 2012 but didn’t like the performance of Lion so I downgraded him to Snow Leopard; I haven’t spoken to him in years but assume he’s upgraded to a newer OS on one of the half-dozen multi-terabyte drives he has installed in that beast.

So, does anyone have any experience with El Capitan on old hardware?

DISCUSSION (14)

M54B30 > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
10/11/2015 at 00:46

I tried to update my iPad

Now it’s sitting on my headboard and won’t turn on

Wait until they fix it’s issues. Half baked software updates didn’t happen under Steve Jobs

IWouldAddai4U > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
10/11/2015 at 00:50

Are you running Mavericks now? Anecdotal evidence with a similar MBP running Mavericks would tell me to tell you “Go right ahead.” I doubt performance will be any different, and I think El Capitan has some under the hood performance boosts, so you’re probably good.

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > IWouldAddai4U
10/11/2015 at 01:08

I’m currently running Snow Leopard and I’m OK with the performance. Unlike the mini I haven’t tried any OS upgrades on the MBP.

I have just finished the install to an external hard drive, but can’t yet comment on the performance. The machine booted and I logged in, but so far I can’t really do anything because the trackpad isn’t responding. Plugging in a USB mouse has restored that functionality, but I’ll need to find out why the trackpad isn’t working. There are a few errors popping up about old software and Java versions, so let me tweak with it and get back to you...

IWouldAddai4U > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
10/11/2015 at 01:11

Hmmm. Interesting. Good luck!

jester74 > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
10/11/2015 at 01:19

Upgrade it to Linux

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > jester74
10/11/2015 at 01:27

That’s what I’ve got on one of the PCs, but I don’t use it all that much. I may have been a hardcore geek in the past, but today I just want something simple that works with a minimum of involvement on my part. I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with Linux, but I really don’t want to be bothered with another OS at the moment.

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > IWouldAddai4U
10/11/2015 at 01:49

Update 1 - it’s not too bad at all. Despite the age of the computer it still feels quick and responsive, perhaps even quicker than it did under SL. I might even go ahead and install this on the mini. There was an annoying message that was popping up regarding some MLB crap that was installed on the system, but once Java was updated (and those messages didn’t pop up every 8-10 seconds) I could go in and remove that garbage. The mouse thing will take a little more tweaking, but I assume that it will be solvable. I had the system set to disable the trackpad if another pointing device was plugged in, but that doesn’t appear to be working at the moment.

Overall I’m quite pleased and see no reason to switch back to SL. I suspect that it will be even faster once I take this hard drive out of the docking station and mount it internally. Even though it was a free upgrade, it seems good enough to be worth paying for. Not bad, Apple, not bad at all.

IWouldAddai4U > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
10/11/2015 at 02:17

Awesome. Glad it went smoothly. I need to update Java to get rid of the popup, but I feel like I had an issue last time I did. I can’t go to El Capitan until I get home from this work trip. Don’t want to ruin any project files!

IWouldAddai4U > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
10/11/2015 at 02:18

I forgot how much an upgrade EC from SL is. Totally different. Spotlight searches with cmd+space are the absolute best.

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > IWouldAddai4U
10/11/2015 at 02:23

Same command works in SL - I just checked on the mini. It’s probably been years since you used SL so I’ll cut you some slack.

BJ > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
10/11/2015 at 06:38

I’m running Yosemite on a late 2007 20” iMac. It’s fine, no worse than the previous versions. The computer only gets light use, but it’s adequate for our needs.

I’m planning to upgrade to El Capitain, I suspect it’ll work fine.

When upgrading, there’s always a short period immediately after upgrade when spotlight is reindexing and other services are resetting. Be patient for the first hour or so of operation before making a judgement.

deekster_caddy > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
10/11/2015 at 08:28

All of the reports are that it runs better and faster on old hardware, so I’d go for it. Before you do, make sure you have 2-3 backups. I have time machine and I just cloned my hard drive to another yesterday, planning to upgrade today on my 2011 MBP. It took longer than I expected to copy my drive off in full, didn’t realize I was at 300GB in use! Forgot how much space a couple VMs take up!!

deekster_caddy > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
10/11/2015 at 08:33

It might be a good opportunity to clone your drive and do a clean install. Although that’s a bit harder on an ‘08 system as I don’t think they have the built in recovery partition so you’ll need to make a USB clone of the installer. How much RAM? I’ve found that RAM and SSDs make the biggest performance improvements especially on the Mac. My 2011 MBP with 16GB of RAM and an SSD blows away my wife’s “faster” 2013 MBP with 4GB of RAM and a spinning drive.

IWouldAddai4U > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
10/11/2015 at 15:36

Thanks. I think it’s that it got moved to the center of the screen and feels a little more useable. Although it might have been in that spot since SL, too. Either way, enjoy and good luck getting that mouse going!