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- Dec 13, 2009
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- Your Mac's Specs
- MacBook Air mid-2013 4GB, and other machines
Hi All, I am visiting a relative who has a 2 GHz Intel Core Duo iMac from 2006, 2 GB of RAM, not possible to add more RAM according to Crucial.com.
It is "slow"-whatever that means. I haven't used this machine much as I just visit occasionally, but it is maybe slow opening applications, and sometimes web page loading can stall.
It's possible to change to an SSD or hybrid drive, but I don't have time to do that while I'm here.
I'm wondering if an OS update is worthwhile as this is still at 10.6.8. Snow Leopard. Yosemite will not run on this hardware, so my questions come to:
- Which later versions will actually run on this hardware?
- Can any of those still be downloaded? Or not really?
- IIRC, update from Snow Leopard is not easy. I would want to backup and reformat the hard drive, and do a fresh install from scratch (i.e. I would need a complete installer, not an update install).
- IF the above two are possible, will they offer better memory management?
The advantage of this iMac is no glass on the screen, a big deal since there are windows all behind the computer (and no, the owner is not going to relocate it).
It is "slow"-whatever that means. I haven't used this machine much as I just visit occasionally, but it is maybe slow opening applications, and sometimes web page loading can stall.
It's possible to change to an SSD or hybrid drive, but I don't have time to do that while I'm here.
I'm wondering if an OS update is worthwhile as this is still at 10.6.8. Snow Leopard. Yosemite will not run on this hardware, so my questions come to:
- Which later versions will actually run on this hardware?
- Can any of those still be downloaded? Or not really?
- IIRC, update from Snow Leopard is not easy. I would want to backup and reformat the hard drive, and do a fresh install from scratch (i.e. I would need a complete installer, not an update install).
- IF the above two are possible, will they offer better memory management?
The advantage of this iMac is no glass on the screen, a big deal since there are windows all behind the computer (and no, the owner is not going to relocate it).