Mountain Lion on a 2009 MBP / Core 2 Duo....

Hephaestus said:

Has anyone managed to operate Mountain Lion on a 2009 MBP using a C2D? This is my computer so I'd like some feedback on its performance before I upgrade. I had Lion on my 2011 iMac and it performed terribly so I didn't even bother putting it on my MBP.
I'm hoping that Mountain Lion is much more optimized and smooth. Anyone tried it? Any heating problems? Lag? Unresponsiveness? Some comments would be really appreciated! I've searched the forum but couldn't find anything.

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I had only minor complaints with Lion, but Mt. Lion feels much more responsive. No beachballs, no obvious lags (the long lag with Lion when dropping files on an alias has disappeared), and I suspect it is the same or better than SL. No benchmarks to back that up, sorry. Permissions repair, which was painfully slow in Lion, now takes only a few minutes. I had to do a clean install, GM refused to install as an update on my HD, producing an error, which I suspect was related to the creation of the repair partition. A Mac mini 2011 had no such problem. An HD erase (boot up from an external clone) and using Migration to pull all my apps, settings, and data resulted in an overnight install with no major issues. Had to repair permissions and run Disk Warrior on the internal drive, but everything has been fine since. Some 2009 MBPs have had issues with the 3G SATA controllers/firmware, but mine shows a 3G connection and negotiated speed running the 1.7 firmware.
The ML installer deletes itself after a successful install, so make a copy on another disk just to be safe.
Hope that helps.

I have had ML installed on my wife's '09 MBP 15" C2D 2.66Ghz since the 1st DP and I haven't heard a peep from her yet, I hardly touch her laptop but the few times I have it seemed quite stable and quick.

I did install a ForceGT SSD in it a couple months ago so that may be helping things a bit.

Installed on a 5400rpm 1tb HDD with specs below. No problems, same speed as Lion was IMO. I almost always am running Microsoft Word, Adobe Acrobat, Chrome (2-3 tabs), mail, calendar, iTunes, transmission, and iMessages simultaneously. I took a screenshot of activity monitor below. My computer has not been turned off for 2 days.

Definitely no worse then Lion,most things are slightly faster or more refined. I still think Snow Leopard is the quickest OSX for the older C2D macs.

upgraded my mid-09 mbp5,5 to ML about 18hrs ago, running smoothly after indexing finished up. my candybar install broke, but everything else seems to be working fine. no sluggishness. I'm going to do a little benchmarking with nova/geek bench and we'll see.

Hephaestus said:

Has anyone managed to operate Mountain Lion on a 2009 MBP using a C2D? This is my computer so I'd like some feedback on its performance before I upgrade. I had Lion on my 2011 iMac and it performed terribly so I didn't even bother putting it on my MBP.

I'm hoping that Mountain Lion is much more optimised and smooth. Anyone tried it? Any heating problems? Lag? Unresponsiveness? Some comments would be really appreciated! I've searched the forum but couldn't find anything.

Click to expand...

I have a 2009 C2D MacBook Pro running Lion, and it goes sweet - I assume Mountain Lion will work fine too

Running ML on a 13" 2009 MBP (2.53ghz, 8GB Ram and just installed a 512GB SSD) and its a general improvement on Lion. I think its smoother though it actually fairs a little worse on Geekbench benchmarks compared to Snow Leopard (benched recently but before the SSD upgrade).

I have no issues recommending the upgrade when its releases.

Now on the otherhand there does appear to be a memory leak when running on my early 2009 Mac Mini (ManagedServices growing over time till its using 4GB of Swap!). Haven't pinpointed why this is happening yet (only noticed in the last couple of dayS)

Hephaestus said:

Thanks for all the replies! So the general consensus is that it runs better than Lion and is pretty smooth? Some of you mentioned that Snow Leopard is still slightly quicker. To be honest I thought that'd be the case. Mountain Lion is definitely packing a lot more memory heavy features so it's not that surprising.

I'm just hoping that it doesn't affect daily use.

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Running better than Lion on a Core 2 Duo machine is faint praise, indeed. Lion is an absolute dog on my early 2008 15" MBP. It's like trying to work through a thick coating of cold molasses. Sluggish, lots of "beach ball" wait cursors, lots of pregnant pauses. Nasty. I'm a developer, so I had to do it, but man, it sucks!

In contrast, Snow Leopard was very crisp. Ran beautifully.

I guess I should be happy that ML is at least a little better, and not worse. Lion is so slow it makes me want to throw the damn machine out the window sometimes. Much of the time, even.

Hephaestus said:

This is the exact computer I have! I have a 2.66 GHz with a 1TB HDD but without the 8GB RAM... I'm packing 4GB. If you could expand a little I'd really appreciate it. How is the boot and shutdown times? Do you get any beachballs when launching multiple apps? How is safari? Are there any issues with Office? Thanks!

I ran pretty much the same applications as you and checked my memory usage and attached the results. From a quick look I'd say performance is pretty similar when accounting for the RAM differences.

EDIT: Just ordered 8GB RAM from Crucial, should be installed by Tuesday.

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I did on Lion before the ram upgrade (went from 4gb to 8gb). No issues, although safari is slow, but it always is. I'm a chrome fan. latest benchmarks prove that chrome is still faster at just about everything.

Also, no change in startup times in my experience. I think only a SSD would fix that, but I love having 1tb of storage with me at all times.