MBA 13 Mid 2012 Catalina bad idea?

[whoknows87]

Decided to go ahead and upgrade this old Mid 2012 to Catalina.. and It looks like it was a bad idea, anyone with a similar experience? computer is very laggy and slow. is it time to give this machine up? its 1.8Ghz i5 with 8GB RAM if any of that matters

 

[Tekguy0]

Should be fine. It may be a bit stressed at times but with 8 GB should be OK.

 

[whoknows87]

Should be fine. It may be a bit stressed at times but with 8 GB should be OK.

It's very laggy, what do you recommend I do ?

 

[yansun]

Did you just upgrade? It could be due to the OS indexing the harddrive after the upgrade. I would wait a few hours and see if the Mac continues to be that laggy... On which OS the MBA was before btw.? Mine from 2013 is running on High Sierra very,very smoothly.

 

[edubfromktown]

With hardware of that vintage, I would not recommend going beyond Mojave. That is what I run on a 2012 MBP and it is quite snappy/usable...

Assuming you have a backup, a clean install of Mojave and Migration Assistant import of your backup data might be a better approach than upgrading in place directly from older macOS versions.

You can create a bootable installer of Mojave and other prior generation OSes quite easily if needed.

 

[whoknows87]

Did you just upgrade? It could be due to the OS indexing the harddrive after the upgrade. I would wait a few hours and see if the Mac continues to be that laggy... On which OS the MBA was before btw.? Mine from 2013 is running on High Sierra very,very smoothly.

yeah I just upgraded ..i honestly do not remember what OS but i think it was High Sierra because I had to upgrade to Mojave then this... just typing this out on the keyboard is a pain keyboard so laggy
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With hardware of that vintage, I would not recommend going beyond Mojave. That is what I run on a 2012 MBP and it is quite snappy/usable...

Assuming you have a backup, a clean install of Mojave and Migration Assistant import of your backup data might be a better approach than upgrading in place directly from older macOS versions.

You can create a bootable installer of Mojave and other prior generation OSes quite easily if needed.

I didn't make a back up.. anything that is important i can just move over to my externals. so you recommend going back to Mojave?

 

[Jack Neill]

My 2012 runs Catalina quite well, I only have 4Gb of ram too. It just wont multitask very well. Running just a few apps at a time works fine. Might want to try a clean install.

 

[edubfromktown]

yeah I just upgraded ..i honestly do not remember what OS but i think it was High Sierra because I had to upgrade to Mojave then this... just typing this out on the keyboard is a pain keyboard so laggy
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I didn't make a back up.. anything that is important i can just move over to my externals. so you recommend going back to Mojave?

If you continue to experience sluggish performance, I'd strongly consider it. Mojave will be less resource intensive on a 2012 system than Catalina for sure.

 

[twintin]

I have a mid 2012 Air with 8 GB which I upgraded yesterday from Mojave to Catalina and it seems to work equally well as Mojave. Perhaps install as new may help ?