El Capitan on Mid 2010 Macbook?

[eoblaed]

4GB RAM, spinning HD. 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo

Currently running 10.6.8

This is a machine that is going to be mailed off to my mother-in-law. I'm considering putting El Cap on it to keep her 'future proofed' as much as possible (eg. if she upgrades to iOS 9 on her iPhone, etc). I won't have physical access to it once I send it to her.

Anyone have any comparisons of El Capitan on a machine like this vs. 10.6?

 

[Dragoro]

It made my mid 2012 run extremely slow.

 

[DeltaMac]

4GB, with a spinning hard drive? Would work, but not too happy about it.
I guess you don't like your mother-in-law too much, eh?

Double the RAM, if you can.
Replace the hard drive with an SSD, and the additional RAM would not be quite as necessary, but would still be nice to have.
A happy mother-in-law can be a Good Thing™

 

[eoblaed]

4GB, with a spinning hard drive? Would work, but not too happy about it.
I guess you don't like your mother-in-law too much, eh?

Double the RAM, if you can.
Replace the hard drive with an SSD, and the additional RAM would not be quite as necessary, but would still be nice to have.
A happy mother-in-law can be a Good Thing™

Well, I do like her, is the thing, which is why I was hoping to give her a more modern OS that's more secure, etc.

Double the RAM would be about $120, an SSD would be about $150, especially since I don't have the luxury of waiting days for stuff to be mailed to me (I have to get what I can get from the local suppliers). Another ~$300 over what I've already spent is a bit more than I think we're going to do. Oh, well.

 

[DeltaMac]

I agree, that's a lot to spend on a 5 year old laptop.

But if I look at Amazon - 2 x 4GB SODIMMs for about $45, and 240 GB Crucial BX200 SSD about $65. (just sayin'... )
So, about $110 - pay some extra for quickest way to ship, and...
Probably $130, at the most. (not really too close to $300)
I'm guessing you are in another country, making shipping (and availability) more of a concern.

 

[b1055]

I have 8GB RAM and 1TB HDD on my Mid 2010 Macbook.

El Capitan works perfectly. No need to upgrade to SSD.

 

[DeltaMac]

Well, yes.
OP has 4GB now.
El Cap, with 4GB and an HDD may not be as happy.
Doubling the RAM will help a lot.
Replacing the HDD with SSD would help it work better if you decide to leave it at 4GB RAM.
Doing both RAM and SSD is the ideal result.

 

[Max(IT)]

El Capitan is working very well on my wife's 2010 MBA with 2 Gb of RAM.
It actually is the faster OS X ever installed on that MacBook Air

 

[MrAverigeUser]

El Capitan is working very well on my wife's 2010 MBA with 2 Gb of RAM.
It actually is the faster OS X ever installed on that MacBook Air

well… max RAM and SSD is always a good combination.

I recommend to backup the ML (OSX 10.6.8) before upgrading to El Crap - so you can easily go back to a good old running system. Perhaps last versions of ML or Mavericks should be better OSX than El Crap?

A mother-in law getting trouble by a gift can get dangerous…

 

[Max(IT)]

well… max RAM and SSD is always a good combination.

I recommend to backup the ML (OSX 10.6.8) before upgrading to El Crap - so you can easily go back to a good old running system. Perhaps last versions of ML or Mavericks should be better OSX than El Crap?

A mother-in law getting trouble by a gift can get dangerous…

In my experience on two old macs (2009 mini and 2010 MacBook Air) OS X El Capitan is better than Mavericks.

 

[DeltaMac]

My opinion is that an SSD can help balance out the need to upgrade the RAM.
The 2010 MBAir already has an SSD, so would be less restricted by the minimal RAM that it would have with El Cap and an HDD.
Your 2009 mini CAN be upgraded - when the MBAir has what it has, with very little opportunity to upgrade anything.
Yosemite, then EL Capitan has gone further with tuning up the compressed memory, which does help in low RAM situations, and you should expect that you may end up with better performance than older OS X versions.

 

[c8rlo]

Anyone have any comparisons of El Capitan on a machine like this vs. 10.6?

I have an 2010, it has 6gb RAM and a Crucial 256gb SSD and it runs fine with El Capitan. As others have stated doubling the RAM and at minimum an 128gb SSD addition wouldn't be a bad idea to help everything run smooth. Both are relatively cheap to buy and easy to install.

 

[witherwings]

Mid-2010 15" MacBook Pro, 8GB RAM El Capitan here. Used to have HDD before. After upgrading to SSD and enabling TRIM via terminal command, never regretted. Best upgrade ever.
I don't feel the need to replace the laptop soon

 

[eoblaed]

So, I installed El Capitan on it, stock, at first. (4GB RAM, spinning HDD). It actually didn't run noticeably worse than Snow Leopard, which was nice.

Still, I opted to throw an SSD in there which made things significantly smoother, as would be expected.

Thanks for the feedback, everyone

 

[Ergolad]

So, I installed El Capitan on it, stock, at first. (4GB RAM, spinning HDD). It actually didn't run noticeably worse than Snow Leopard, which was nice.

Still, I opted to throw an SSD in there which made things significantly smoother, as would be expected.

Thanks for the feedback, everyone

[doublepost=1460842921][/doublepost]Old long gone thread, but anyone reading this, if you can afford it, do both the SSD upgrade AND the RAM upgrade (max to 16GB on Mid 2010 13" MBP) from reputable tested vendors. My machine runs significantly faster than it did out of the box. My issues are now failing components (i.e. trackpad).