Yosemite Advice

[Nick Ireland]

My school practically gave me a stock white macbook 7,1 almost 4 years ago. Because it was a school laptop they upgraded it from 10.6 up to 10.8 which significantly ruined the performance, when i upgraded it to 10.9 that saw a small improvement but when i downgraded back to 10.6 it was lovely and suddenly i had decent performance and battery life.

I've never upgraded it physically , i mostly use it for document editing and audio recording/production (currently the core 2 2.4 and 2gb of ram are just enough for what I do). I'm assuming that yosemite will incur a performance penalty (but hopefully less than mavericks), but would it be worth it for all the new features?

 

[MacInWin]

2GB will most likely NOT work well with Yosemite, if at all. It's not good for Mavericks, so I cannot believe it will be good for Yosemite.

 

[RadDave]

2GB will most likely NOT work well with Yosemite, if at all. It's not good for Mavericks, so I cannot believe it will be good for Yosemite.

Agree w/ Jake, i.e. you just need more RAM to run the most recent OS Xs - see this Discussion concerning upgrading the RAM on your machine; also check your model at Every Mac for more details - you'll need to make sure the correct type of RAM is purchased (OWC is one good place to look) - Dave

 

[chas_m]

I don't know the specifics of your machine, but yeah Snow Leopard runs fine in 2GB, but later OS releases need more.

If your machine is a 2010 then it should be good for at least 8GB of RAM. I'd max it out to whatever the max it can take is (check everymac.com for that) and then I think you'll find that Mavericks will run just fine.

Based on my testing of Yosemite, I would not recommend it for anyone who has less than 8GB of RAM. I had 4GB in this machine and the experience was slow. Moved it to 10GB (one 8GB and one 2GB module) and the improvement was dramatic, moved up to 16GB and performance is stellar.

Another option (in addition) to squeeze more performance out of that machine (if you're determined to keep it, it's at least four years old now) is to replace the HD with an SSD. "Dramatic" doesn't even cover the leap in performance.