App store hanging on El capitan update

I'm running snow leopard on a early 2009 Imac, I actually wanted to update to Yosemite but that seems to have been superseded by El Capitan in the app store.

Every time I click onto the icon 'get' for El Capitan in the app store it hangs on the spinning beachball. As a side note other smaller apps like solitaire don't induce a crash.

If anyone has any ideas it would be much appreciated

Thanks

A spinning beach ball does not, particularly in this case, always indicate a crash.

A solitaire game is probably a couple of megs. El Capitan is something like 6GB. That might take a few minutes to prepare.

Check back and let us know if you're still getting a beachball after you let it go for two hours.

Hi Chas

Yes, I considered that although I didn't leave it for as long as two hours, I left it for at least half an hour.

I will try leaving it on for longer and report back

Thanks!

ok i have tried leaving for hours on end, stiil no repreive. I also realise that the nature of the fact that i cant make it past the <get> button to even get to the green install button that may actual have some lag due to the app size of a whole OS. Its not downloading its just not responding at all.

Before trying the download, go into Disk Utility and see if you can verify the hard drive, and if all goes well, how much free space is on the drive? Make sure you back everything up to an external hard drive and when you do get El Capitan and consider doing a format of the drive and a clean install. You are jumping five operating systems so there may be some troubles. Also consider increasing the memory to 8GB. All 2009 models can handle that, and more in some cases.

Also you are hitting the Get El Capitan button from the l.h. pane under Quick Limks which is an operating system upgrade and NOT the OS X.11 to OSX.11.1 update?

Keep us posted?