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First time mac user, a few questions

S

StlSportsMed

macrumors member
Original poster
Jan 28, 2009
30
0
Long time PC/ThinkPad guy here. Just picked up what I believe to be a 3.1 MBP on the super cheap.

It has a clean install of Snow Leopard on it, runs good (a tad warm). Im sure everyone knows, but I am finding out how out of date SL is and its making me not really want to keep the MPB

I read that is the newest OS that will run on my 3.1 but I did a google search for "Macbook 3.1 Mavericks" and a lot of results came up that lead me to believe people are easily installing Mavericks on these older machines?

Is this true? Safari with minimal to no flash support is a chore to work with. Im not a power user by any means but I would like to be able to be up to date. My thinkpad is a t60 from late 2006 and it runs windows 8.1 rather flawlessly so it should stand to reason that a MBP with roughly the same specs should be able to keep up with a more current OSX???

School me please :)

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I should say I dont care if I can get all the way up to mavericks, just something that supports Chrome browser and current flash
 
How much RAM does it have? 4GB and it shouldn't be an issue running Mavericks.
 
Can you tell us exactly which MacBook you have?
There's a big difference between a MacBook, and a Macbook Pro.
MacBook3,1 can go to Lion (one generation past what you have now), and a MacBookPro3,1 supports the current Mavericks.

Boot your MacBook, go to the Apple menu (top left corner), and then About this Mac. On that window, click the More Info… button.
That will launch the System Profiler, and the Hardware info will show you your Model Identifier.
It can also help to know what processor you have, and how much memory is installed. All of that is in that same Hardware window.

BTW, the 10.6.8 that you are running now supports the current Chrome browser (if you really want that), and Chrome generally has a fairly current Flash version built in to Chrome. No need to install the current version, although nothing prevents you from doing that, too!
 
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Thanks for the info!
Don't confuse your MacBook Pro with a MacBook!
You can upgrade to Mavericks.
I recommend that you also upgrade your RAM, even if you don't upgrade to Mavericks.
You can have a maximum of 6 GB of RAM installed.
 
What a relief to get all the info straighten out.

Cant believe I scored this MBP for $60!!! OEM box, papers, discs EVERYTHING

Guy said it wouldnt boot right..........ram module wasnt seated correctly SCORE

Thanks guys
 
so to clarify what I was reading, 10.5 was the highest free upgrade for this machine????

Any older MBP guys able to tell me what runs best on my machine from 10.6 and up??
 
StlSportsMed said:
so to clarify what I was reading, 10.5 was the highest free upgrade for this machine????

Any older MBP guys able to tell me what runs best on my machine from 10.6 and up??
Click to expand...

I'd play around with Snow Leopard and see if it meets your needs. As mentioned, you can upgrade to Mavericks for free (once you own Snow Leopard), so might as well try that too. You can always go back to Snow Leopard if you want. Or you can set up a dual boot.

As mentioned, Snow Leopard is still supported by the latest version of Chrome. The same is also true of the latest Firefox.

You'd probably want to up the RAM for Mavericks.

Cant believe I scored this MBP for $60!!! OEM box, papers, discs EVERYTHING

Guy said it wouldnt boot right..........ram module wasnt seated correctly SCORE
Click to expand...

Yeah, that's a SCORE! It looks to be in very good shape too. If you like it and think that it might be part of your life for a while, an SSD would be worth considering. Enjoy your new computer and enjoy learning OS X.
 
I found some RAM locally but it is DDR3 8300, My machine will only run 5300 is that correct??
 
so I bought a 10.6 disc and rebooted while holding C, tried to install and it said OSX cannot be installed on this machine.
What do I do
 
Did your buy your Snow Leopard DVD direct from Apple?
this:
http://store.apple.com/us/product/MC573Z/A/mac-os-x-106-snow-leopard
If you got it new from Apple, it would be a 10.6.3 version (maybe higher, although I have never seen one), and NOT 10.6
Where did you get that DVD? Hard to tell what you might get if you went to eBay (or torrent download?) for that. It won't be worth saving a couple of bucks when Apple sells it for only $20.

For your other question about RAM, you need PC2-5300 DDR2 SO-DIMMs
The DDR3 that you mentioned won't physically fit.
 
Yeah I learned the hard way, bought some disc's for cheap on the Clist.....they are machine discs not retail upgrade.........They guy is nice and giving me my money back.
 
This is the RAM that will be compatible with your machine.
 
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Really nice score, great price.
Coming from the Windows world the older model with the mouse button makes it a little easier. When my Windows using friends or family use my macbook pro they tend to get confused about where the mouse button is!
 
bigeasy_uk said:
Really nice score, great price.
Coming from the Windows world the older model with the mouse button makes it a little easier. When my Windows using friends or family use my macbook pro they tend to get confused about where the mouse button is!
Click to expand...

Took me a minute to find the right click option :)
 
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