updating old mac

I have an old macbook a 1278 and I just updated it with osx snow leopard 10.6.3. But I still need to update the operating system again. Do I have to update with mountain lion then lion then mavericks or can I just skip them and go strait to mavericks? Will my old computer even handle that operating system? Thanks I am a novice when it comes to computers.

Is Mavericks your ultimate goal?

Have you downloaded Mavericks previously? If not…it is no longer available via the Mac App store.

- Nick

hey

The ultimate goal is to get it updated as far as I can go. I just want it operating smoothly. Currently with snow leopard it won't open gmail fully and play youtube videos. I am assuming this has to do with the websites not cooperating with a browser that is 5 years old.

Need to know how much ram it has. And probably knowing what speed processor it has would help identify exactly what MacBook model it is.

- Nick

Looks like ti is late 2008 model. It can handle up to 8GB of memory and suggest increasing to that, update to OS X.6.8 and then upgrade to Yosemite OS X.10 via the App Store. You will need an Apple ID to download Yosemite, and the good news it is free.

From there I suggest to copy Yosemite to an 8GB USB thumb drive using LionDiskMakerX, and after backing up to an external drive, erase and do a clean install. Hook up the external and use Migration Assistant in Utilities to bring everything across.

Be aware that old PowerPC applications, such as Office 2004, will not run on anything later than Snow Leopard. Rosetta which enabled this was culled with Lion OS X.7.

Also, are you aware 10.6.3 can be upgraded to 10.6.8? If you did that alone your You Tube and other issue would probably be gone.