Advice Needed

Here is my plan. I need a Macbook for travel. I now have an I Mac, 2.33 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM, running 10.4.11. 6 years old and going strong.

I plan getting the 13" Macbook Pro, which one is one of the advices I need. Which one?

I want to upgrade the operating system on my I Mac to Lion. Will 2 MG SDRAM handle Lion?

When the I Mac goes "belly up" I will gat a Thunderbolt Display and make the MBPro a cpu and unhook it for travel. More advice needed. Best way to go?

Any member thoughts will be greatly appreciated.

cs

Your iMac (not I Mac) is qualified to run Lion (just). It will run in 2GB of RAM but I'd really suggest maxing out the RAM (which I believe for that machine would be 4GB). It shouldn't be expensive to do so.

However, you need to bear in mind two things when considering the jump from Tiger to Lion:

1. A lot of your third-party software may need to be replaced with new versions. Some of this will be free (particularly if you've kept up with updates) but some of it may not be. Some software may just stop working altogether (AppleWorks, older Quicken and MS Office versions for example) and need to be replaced with entirely different programs. Are you prepared for that?

2. In your case I'd suggest upgrading to Lion by purchasing the $69 Lion USB thumb drive directly from Apple. This will bypass the need to upgrade to Snow Leopard first, though that route is about $10 less expensive, but you'll have a hard copy of the OS should you need it. It should go without saying that you should make sure you have made at least a bootable clone of your entire hard drive to an external drive PRIOR to upgrading.

Now, onto the "MacBook for travel" idea. Any particular reason you've ruled out the MacBook Air? I find that when I travel, all I actually need is the iPad -- though I can see with your future plan that this might not be the right path for you. But consider the MB Air as an alternative to the MacBook Pro if your travel needs aren't particularly heavy.