iMac upgrade from Snow Leopard

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I rarely refurbish myiMac,Iconfess, but feel I should ste up from Microsoft Office 2004 and also take the plunge from Snow Leopard to Lion (Mavericks?). But which to do and in what order?
 
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I'd certainly upgrade the OS, before moving to a different office suite.
 

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How old is your iMac? Please provide some specs so that we can tell you if you need to do any hardware upgrades before moving to Mavericks.

If you have the latest version of Snow Leopard (10.6.8) installed, you can upgrade to Mavericks directly without going through any other intermediary upgrades..
 
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My iMac is coming up to five years old and is running Snow Leopard 10.6.8 with a 2.8 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo and 4 GB memory. Can more memory be loaded? Is a system upgrade for the experts?
Rob
 

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The specs of your iMac say that you upgrade to 6GB of memory using 1 2GB (your current one) and a 4GB stick.

The upgrade is very easy, the slots are the bottom of the iMac. Remove the cover, pull one of the sticks out and push a new one in.

Now as far as upgrading to Mavericks goes, you have to ask yourself if you really want/need to. If things are working well with Snow Leopard (which is the minimum version of OS X for a lot of apps) then you might want to stick with this until that situation changes or if you upgrade to a newer Mac.

Newer versions of OS X are inherently going to be designed for newer versions of Mac with higher hardware specs and capabilities, so while your iMac is compatible, you have to realize that you might take a performance hit that might or might not be suited to you..
 

Slydude

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Mavericks runs reasonably well on the Core 2 Duo processor. It runs well on my MacBook Pro. There are a couple of things that you need to do before you start the upgrade process.

1. Check to make sure that you don't have some older Power PC apps that you need to run. Snow Leopard can still run Power PC apps but Lion, Mountain Lion and Mavericks can't. Here's one way to tell if you're still running Power PC apps.

2. Use something like Super Duper, Carbon Copy Cloner, etc. to clone your current installation to an external drive. Make sure it is a bootable clone. That will be the easiest way to go back to Snow Leopard if you don't like the changes.
 
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I'd certainly upgrade the OS, before moving to a different office suite.
If I'm not mistaken, Snow Leopard is the highest OS on which Office 2004 will run. So if the OS is upgraded, Office will need to be upgraded also. There are other options, such as the free Libre Office.
 

chscag

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Member "toMACsh" is correct. Office 2004 requires Rosetta to run and Snow Leopard was the last version of OS X to provide it. As advised, you will need a new Office suite.
 
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Very many thanks for all your pertinent advice. I think I have decided that if it ain't broke why fix it is my best solution. But if it is correct that I can feed it an extra two gig of RAM until I can afford a new iMac with all the upgrades, then that's what I think I will do. Strange though.I thought I had fully loaded all the RAM it could take when I bought it. I much appeciate all your time and wisdom.
Best wishes
Rob
 
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Many thanks for the memory link. I think I will do it from home (UK) and get the sterling equivalent.
Many thanks once more for all your great contributions.
Rob
 
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Rob you are like us Down Under and get fleeced dealing locally. Check the prices first. For me can get things from OWC, pay top air mail service, delivery within seven days and still much, much cheaper than local suppliers.

For memory stick with Crucial or OWC.
 
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Thanks for that winsome piece of advice. I'll follow that up. By the way, do you have a corgi or a malamute?
Rob
 
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Alamosa Bit of a Smasher Pembroke. Bred from US champ Bit of a Sportscoat. As she is now 8, show days behind us and I am getting too old for all that grooming, trotting etc.
 
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I know just what you mean. She does look tremendous though. We migrated from Corgis to Cavaliers a few years back.They're friendlier -- with us and each other.
Thanks for all your help on other matters,by the way
 
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Nothing wrong with staying with SN. Lion is not worth the hassle to install. If you go to Mavericks, it does a great job of migrating all of your info from your latest Time Machine. Mavericks was a bit of a pain until 9.3. The best way to see what any Mac can do is to install the FREE app Mactracker.
 
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I have a late 2007 macbook. Am I able to upgrade to Maverick. I use it on my Mac Pro 2013 and love it. I'd like some of the short cuts, etc. that aren't available with Snow Leopard.
 
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My iMac is older than yours (2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo - T7200) and I'm sticking with Snow Leopard 10.6.8. I also have Office 2004 so we're in the same boat. My display is starting to go with two red and one green vertical lines in the display which will only get worse so I'm getting an adapter cable from Monoprice and a HDMI monitor to keep it going. It still works great for everything I do and will get something newer when this one croaks.
 
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There's nothing wrong with staying with Snow Leopard, especially if you don't need any Mavericks "features", and as mentioned, your MS Office 2004 and any other PPC apps won't run with any OS X later than SL.

But upgrading your RAM can sure help, and often you can get a 6-8% speed boost using matched pairs or RAM.

Check the specific limitations for your particular iMac at:
Apple iMac Specs (All iMac Tech Specs) @ EveryMac.com

Then maybe check out the memory that's available:
Canada RAM sells memory in Canada - Apple Macintosh iMac intel Core2Duo, CoreDuo 17", 20" and 24"

PS: You can always make a clone of your SL to an external volume with CCC and upgrade it to Mavericks and then you could have both OS X versions available to use.
 

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