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djr7572

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jun 29, 2011
483
100
I'm currently running Snow Leopard with 4 GB of RAM and it seems to run pretty smooth and "zippy", as it should. I'd like to upgrade to Lion but I'm wondering - is Lion roughly the same size as Snow Leopard, or is it bigger to the point where I'll see a degredation of speed and smoothness?
 
Know, that "memory" is not the same as "hard drive capacity":
What is Computer Memory? RAM vs Hard Drive
RAM vs. Hard Disk

Lion will run on 4GB RAM, but it is a bit hungrier than Snow Leopard and still has some bugs to be caught.

And Lion consumes less storage capacity than Snow Leopard does, comparing two clean installations of course.

Ok, now I'm undecided. I'm pretty content with Snow Leopard for now, but I always prefer to be on the most current OS if I can. But I don't want to give up the smoothness and zippiness that I'm enjoying now, either .... :rolleyes: If my machine can't handle Lion, I just assume stay on Snow Leopard. I'm not doing anything power-hungry on this Mac anyway ... e-mail, internet, iPhoto, and iTunes - that's really about it.
 
Ok, now I'm undecided. I'm pretty content with Snow Leopard for now, but I always prefer to be on the most current OS if I can. But I don't want to give up the smoothness and zippiness that I'm enjoying now, either .... :rolleyes: If my machine can't handle Lion, I just assume stay on Snow Leopard. I'm not doing anything power-hungry on this Mac anyway ... e-mail, internet, iPhoto, and iTunes - that's really about it.

It ran on my 2007 iMac with 4GB, but as Lion is still new and has some bugs, especially related to the RAM, it ran okay, but it was not my cup of tea. But others have had success in running Lion, though you can update. Just make sure to backup via CarbonCopyCloner to an external HDD in case you want to revert to 10.6.
 
It ran on my 2007 iMac with 4GB, but as Lion is still new and has some bugs, especially related to the RAM, it ran okay, but it was not my cup of tea. But others have had success in running Lion, though you can update. Just make sure to backup via CarbonCopyCloner to an external HDD in case you want to revert to 10.6.

Funny, my iMac is from 2007 as well :)

I'm thinking I might stick to Snow Leopard ... because, once you upgrade, it's a pain in the butt to go back to the previous OS if you're not happy. I still feel like I'm missing out if I don't upgrade... anyway, I'll sit on it for a while and think about it. Thanks for your help.
 
Funny, my iMac is from 2007 as well :)

I'm thinking I might stick to Snow Leopard ... because, once you upgrade, it's a pain in the butt to go back to the previous OS if you're not happy. I still feel like I'm missing out if I don't upgrade... anyway, I'll sit on it for a while and think about it. Thanks for your help.

It is not that difficult to restore your iMac back to 10.6 if you have an external HDD you can clone 10.6 onto. The cloning process should not take long, depending how much data you have.

For instance, I upgraded my iMac with a 500GB HDD and created four partitions on it, one for 10.6, one for my user account, one for additional storage and one for whatever purpose I wanted to, thus it was used to install Lion on it, thus I could dual boot between Lion and Snow Leopard and even use the same user account stored on that second partition.
 
For me, I'm going to stay with SL until I must upgrade. Probably for another 6 months (minimum). SL works, there's no bugs (that I've found) and I do NOT need the new features of Lion. I hear Lion makes the insides of the iMac box run hotter as well. For me, it's one of those... "If it isn't broke, why try to fix it?" things in life...
 
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