Give a Unibody macbook a boost

[comda]

Greetings!

My moms friend owns a 2010 Unibody macbook that she just updated to Yosemite. Its extremely slow! Her husband wants her to buy a new one but i suggested giving it a 4gb Ram stick as looking at istats it only has 50mb Free Ram of wiggle room with it on idle. CPU usage is very low.

So if i have it a 4gb DDr3 stick plus the 1gb thats already in there (it has 2gb 1gb stick times 2) giving it 5GB of ram would that give it the proper boost?

 

[ApolloBoy]

I'd definitely bump up the RAM to at least 6 GB and maybe look into an SSD. I upgraded my MacBook with an SSD last month and it's worked wonders.

 

[Thalesian]

Greetings!

My moms friend owns a 2010 Unibody macbook that she just updated to Yosemite. Its extremely slow! Her husband wants her to buy a new one but i suggested giving it a 4gb Ram stick as looking at istats it only has 50mb Free Ram of wiggle room with it on idle. CPU usage is very low.

So if i have it a 4gb DDr3 stick plus the 1gb thats already in there (it has 2gb 1gb stick times 2) giving it 5GB of ram would that give it the proper boost?

First, go with 8 gigs ram - two sticks of 4gb. That will do a lot.

For extra credit, get an SSD and replace the existing HDD with that. If she doesn't use the optical drive, you can use OWC to swap it out with the HDD for more storage space.

 

[tom vilsack]

I would suggest doing these:

-Do a clean install of Yosemite (download from app store and then make a usb stick installer using the third party program called "DiskMaker X"...DiskMaker X

-After doing a clean install,turn off "transparency"......Open System Preferences and go to Accessibility. Next, select Display from the source list along the left, then check the box labelled “Reduce transparency.” Checking this box will eliminate gratuitous transparency from the menubar and menus, the Dock, and application windows.

Then as $$$ permit's....

-Upgrade ram to at least 4 gig's

-Upgrade the harddrive to a SSD

 

[comda]

I would suggest doing these:

-Do a clean install of Yosemite (download from app store and then make a usb stick installer using the third party program called "DiskMaker X"...DiskMaker X

-After doing a clean install,turn off "transparency"......Open System Preferences and go to Accessibility. Next, select Display from the source list along the left, then check the box labelled “Reduce transparency.” Checking this box will eliminate gratuitous transparency from the menubar and menus, the Dock, and application windows.

Then as $$$ permit's....

-Upgrade ram to at least 4 gig's

-Upgrade the harddrive to a SSD

I offered to even do a clean install of Mavericks over Yosemite. NO affense to all yosemite Users but i dont like it.

And with a 4gb stick plus one of the two current ones it will have 5GB. I think thats more then good enough. This lady does nothing on it but email and the web i figure some RAM will be enough.

She doesnt want an SSD. lol

Thanks for the replies guys!