Lion on iMac 5,1 Late 2006 20inch

[iMac-do you?]

Hi fellow Lions and Lionesses,

Just wanted to report my experience of installing Lion on an 'older' white iMac. Specs as follows:

I have done a fresh install by downloading Lion and burning the .dmg file to DVD. Install time was not bad, I was not really keeping track of time, but it felt like around an hour from inserting the DVD and booting off it, to setup completing and arriving at the login screen. It may have been a bit shorter or longer though, as I was doing other things during the install.

Freshly installed, Lion felt so much snappier than Snow Leopard right from the off. A roaring start, one might say!

I proceeded to install my most used applications:
Office 2011
Photoshop CS3
Dreamweaver CS3
Firefox
Skype
VirtualBox running a VM of Windows XP x64
ESET CyberSecurity

I'm pleased to report I have not encountered any issues with above software so far, it all runs smoothly and as I would expect. Do note however, that where possible, the latest version of each app was obtained prior to installing, and in the case of Office 2011 an immediate update to SP1 was carried out. With the speed of Lion it feels like a new machine again.

Overall I'm extremely happy with Lion, its new look and features. Well done Apple. If anyone was concerned about installing Lion on an older machine, I'd say go for it.

 

[Endorphinity]

What surprised me most of all is that Lion recognizes 4 GB of RAM in your iMac, while it was declared for these Core 2 Duo machines that they can address only 3 GB, so I've put exactly 3 GB into mine long ago. Sadly, my iMac now hangs all the time due to faulty video subsystem, and even having Lion installed to it (while it was connected in the target mode to another Mac), doesn't allow to run it well.