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iMac Early 2009 - El Capitan or Mavericks?

O

owenojo

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 9, 2021
6
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Hello all-

I have just been given a free iMac, its a 24" mid 2009 model, what would have been the entry level model of the time with the 9400M graphics. Its got 4GB RAM and a newer 500GB hard disk. Ive current got this setup with El Capitan, using Firefox 78 ESR as my browser, which seems to run a lot faster than chrome, which seems to bog the system down a lot. El cap seems to run ok, a bit laggy at times. I know I could improve things with an SSD etc but this is really only for very light tasks and I dont want to spend any money on it. Im wondering if 10.9 would in fact run a lot smoother on this config?

This is not a main mac - just using for "other" stuff/ web /video and to run older 32bit apps (main machine is a 2015 retina MBP on catalina). Seeing as firefox 78 will also run on Mavericks, and both that an El Cap are pretty old at this point, any diadvantages to going back further in time with the OS?
 
I'd say Mojave. It's the most up-to-date version of macOS with 32-bit app support and it will run very well on this iMac. I can understand you not wanting to put in an SSD but I do really recommend it, even for Mavericks, but especially for El Capitan or Mojave.
EDIT: I must add that the early 2009 iMac I've tested Mojave (and Catalina and Big Sur too!) has a GeForce GT130 gpu instead of an 9400M, so I wouldn't know if having a different GPU would make a difference
 
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You could partition the drive, and add a second boot system.
I have a 2008 iMac that I use for a variety of small tasks, and have both Snow Leopard and El Capitan installed. I normally leave it booted to El Cap, and reboot when I need to use that older Snow Leopard occasionally.
Of course, you could have both Mavericks and El Capitan. Just reboot into whichever system you want at the time.
 
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Heindijs said:
I'd say Mojave. It's the most up-to-date version of macOS with 32-bit app support and it will run very well on this iMac. I can understand you not wanting to put in an SSD but I do really recommend it, even for Mavericks, but especially for El Capitan or Mojave.
EDIT: I must add that the early 2009 iMac I've tested Mojave (and Catalina and Big Sur too!) has a GeForce GT130 gpu instead of an 9400M, so I wouldn't know if having a different GPU would make a difference
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Thank you - Ive tried high sierra via a patch and it runs terribly, its just so slow and the constant disk access is crazy with a hard disk. El capitan seems like the sweet spot but wondered if mavericks might be a better fit.

How did you patch mojave onto an 09?
 
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owenojo said:
Thanks, would mavericks run any better than el capitan from a hard disk, or much the same?
Click to expand...
I’m betting it runs pretty terribly on a hard disk as well. It did not run very well on a 7200rpm hdd on my 2006 iMac but it does run really well after I installed an SSD even though in theory an ssd wouldn’t be beneficial on the slow old sata standard that iMac has.
Snow Leopard does however run really well on an HDD and with only 4 gigs of ram and you can install that on your iMac, however it depends on what kind of software you want to run
 
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Heindijs said:
In theory an ssd wouldn’t be beneficial on the slow old sata standard that iMac has.
Click to expand...
What makes an SSD-equipped computer so responsive is the close-to-zero access times and fast random reads, not the sequential speeds. A slow interface affects the latter much more than the former, so an SSD always makes sense, even over, say, USB 2.0 (on a 2009 Mac mini, running from an SSD attached via USB 2.0 was still faster than from an internal SATA hard drive). :)

owenojo said:
Thanks, would mavericks run any better than el capitan from a hard disk, or much the same?
Click to expand...
I've never tried anything newer than Snow Leopard from a hard disk (and, to be honest, I wouldn't want to ;)).
 
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owenojo said:
Thanks, would mavericks run any better than el capitan from a hard disk, or much the same?
Click to expand...
I use my 2009 iMac with very light use on Mavericks, and it is usable with the spinning hard drive. However, I would also recommend an SSD if you feel up to the task. Mavericks on my 2010 MacBook Pro and SSD is lightning fast and boots in less than 5 seconds.
 
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It has been the better part of ten years since I used an HDD as a boot drive, but I have done so with both Mavericks and Snow Leopard in the past, and I don't remember Mavericks being any slower than Snow Leopard. Both felt perfectly responsive at the time—which is to say, they were perfectly responsive when I was used to using computers with HDDs.

If you're used to the responsiveness of an SSD (ie, if you've used any modern computer), an HDD will feel slow. Mavericks on an HDD will be completely usable—insofar as it will never feel painfully sluggish or downright broken—but everything will happen at a sort of different tempo. An extra moment when opening a folder. An additional second before an app launches. That sort of thing.

Do drop in an SSD if you can, and/or upgrade the memory to 8 GB so the OS can at least do some caching.
 
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Seriously, put in an SSD. A 120 GB SSD will cost $25.

Mavericks is not recommended since it is missing a lot of browser support. I'd say El Capitan is the absolute bare minimum, so that you can get Chrome browser support, but you'll want an SSD. However, even Chrome is a problem since El Capitan suffers from the Sept. 30 certificate issue.

There are workarounds for the certificate issue, but if you want a drama free browsing experience, you're better off going with Sierra or higher, and you'll definitely want an SSD for that.

Heindijs said:
I'd say Mojave. It's the most up-to-date version of macOS with 32-bit app support and it will run very well on this iMac. I can understand you not wanting to put in an SSD but I do really recommend it, even for Mavericks, but especially for El Capitan or Mojave.
EDIT: I must add that the early 2009 iMac I've tested Mojave (and Catalina and Big Sur too!) has a GeForce GT130 gpu instead of an 9400M, so I wouldn't know if having a different GPU would make a difference
Click to expand...
GeForce 9400M is not a problem. The bigger problem is the 2.66 GHz Core 2 Duo CPU, but you can mitigate the problem by using an ad blocker, so that the ads don't steal CPU cycles.
 
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EugW said:
The bigger problem is the 2.66 GHz Core 2 Duo CPU, but you can mitigate the problem by using an ad blocker, so that the ads don't steal CPU cycles.
Click to expand...
Plus a script blocker so that unnecessary scripts don’t run in the background stealing even more CPU cycles.
 
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EugW said:
Seriously, put in an SSD. A 120 GB SSD will cost $25.

Mavericks is not recommended since it is missing a lot of browser support. I'd say El Capitan is the absolute bare minimum, so that you can get Chrome browser support, but you'll want an SSD. However, even Chrome is a problem since El Capitan suffers from the Sept. 30 certificate issue.

There are workarounds for the certificate issue, but if you want a drama free browsing experience, you're better off going with Sierra or higher, and you'll definitely want an SSD for that.


GeForce 9400M is not a problem. The bigger problem is the 2.66 GHz Core 2 Duo CPU, but you can mitigate the problem by using an ad blocker, so that the ads don't steal CPU cycles.
Click to expand...
Putting an adblocker into firefox 78 ESR has has made a huge difference in general responsiveness!!!
 
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