2007 3,1:Upgrade from SL to Lion?

[bubsdaddy]

I have a 207 Macbook white 3,1 with a 2.2 ghz Core 2 Duo and 2 GB of ram. I currently have Snow Leopard 10.6.8 installed. On the Apple Store web site, Lion is a $20 upgrade. Is it worth it? I have read mixed reviews.

I am also trying to decide if I should replace the 120 GB hard drive with a 120 SSD for around $60. I think it would offer a pretty good speed increase and I'm probably going to experience a hard drive failure with this 6 - 7 year old drive.

I bought this for $100 and don't really have a good history other than the girl who sold it to me used it for college. I don't want to spend much on an old Mac but for some reason I think I need to.

 

[Intell]

The upgrade to Lion would give you iCloud features and better security. A SSD would be a very big upgrade in terms of gains, even on that Macbook's SATA I bus.

 

[BrettApple]

With 2GB of RAM, Snow Leopard is going to perform better than Lion will. But if you install 4GB it will be a much smoother experience.

As to the SSD, the most cost effective one I've seen, and what I use in my '09, is the SanDisk Ultra Plus going for a tad under $60 on most retailers. No sense spending more for something that will already saturate the SATA I bus.

Lion will be more up to date (read, secure) and will run newer software, just be aware it likes to use more RAM due to the features, but this isn't as big of a deal if you're swapping to an SSD. So I'd start with the SSD and play with Lion on it and see how you like it.

If you do install Lion with the stock HDD in it, it'll run, but do note that it will be a bit on the slow side compared to Snow Leopard on the same machine. It's just a bigger OS with more to load.

 

[comda]

Greetings bubsdaddy,

I have the exact machine your talking about as im using it right now to type this... 3 weeks ago i did a major upgrade on mine. See here:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1765582/

Even after having 4gb ram, and a SSD I found Lions performance compared to SL very bad. My install started with 10.7.1 and from there i did updates until 10.7.5. ANd what can i say i was disappointed. everything seemed slower. Web pages loading up, start up, etc. The only thing that held me was the fact it had face time. but the lag was an annoyance so i returned the SL.