Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Mistake upgrade to Lion

LEOPARD-RULES

LEOPARD-RULES

macrumors newbie
Original poster
May 4, 2014
7
0
El Cajon California
I wanna thank Mac Rumors for access

OK, here's the deal: my daughter, who I got through San Diego State University using a MAC OS X v10.5 Leopard (http://support.apple.com/kb/sp5) has started Grad School. Yes, I understand that it is 5 years old. 2 months ago, she bought and installed Lion, not Mountain Lion, and now her machine is worthless.. She sez it runs so slow it's worthless. Looking at the specs, it appears to me that Lion needs 2 gig of RAM to run and her machine has only 1. Calling the Apple store here in So Cal is worthless 'cuz they won't let you talk to anybody about a hardware upgrade and give me an opinion on this Leopard to Lion mistake.. They send me straight to Apple Care and after 20 minutes on hold I'm out.

I understand that there is a possibility of security issues with an old O/S but then again, Microsoft isnt convincing anybody to upgrade from XP to 7 really fast. Her computer ran great on Leopard, and I will assume there is no such thing as system restore. I cant afford another $1000 machine at this time. Is a 1 gig RAM upgrade possible to get her machine back online or buying Leopard again or ??????? I',m just a dumb PC user but I need to help her somehow.

I appreciate some opinions.. Thanks
 
All you'd need to do is find the model of RAM that the macbook currently uses and then go on places like amazon or OWC and buy a RAM upgrade kit. 4GB (two 2GB sticks; just 2GB RAM is not enough for lion, it's a resource hog) should be fine for lion.
As far as putting the RAM in, if your daughter still has the manual then it'll show steps on replacing the ram, but if not then there's plenty of guides online (such as ifxit).
 
rapicell said:
All you'd need to do is find the model of RAM that the macbook currently uses and then go on places like amazon or OWC and buy a RAM upgrade kit. 4GB (two 2GB sticks; just 2GB RAM is not enough for lion, it's a resource hog) should be fine for lion.
As far as putting the RAM in, if your daughter still has the manual then it'll show steps on replacing the ram, but if not then there's plenty of guides online (such as ifxit).
Click to expand...

So you think the machine is salvageable just by adding more RAM?

Frankly, I was expecting folks to tell me it's over..:)


Thanks for your time
 
I have a 2006 Macbook with only 2gb of RAM and it runs great with Lion.
 
cjmillsnun said:
Ram will make all the difference.

It'll be like she has a new Mac.
Click to expand...


You're absolutely correct. Our local store only had a stick of 667 2 Gig in stock, and adding that to her current 1 gig made it work great. She has 3 gig of RAM and going over the 2 gig mark fixed the situation.

I wanna thank everybody for their input and opinons and this thread is resolved

Thanks again everybody :)
 
LEOPARD-RULES said:
You're absolutely correct. Our local store only had a stick of 667 2 Gig in stock, and adding that to her current 1 gig made it work great. She has 3 gig of RAM and going over the 2 gig mark fixed the situation.

I wanna thank everybody for their input and opinons and this thread is resolved

Thanks again everybody :)
Click to expand...

Lion definitely is more memory intensive then say Leopard, but it isn't bad after all the updates. When I first used it during the 10.7.2 days it was really bad and could easily choke a 8 GB of RAM equipped 2011 MacBook Pro!

Glad you got it running. When you can, you could upgrade to an SSD and another 2 GB stick for a total of four and have practically a brand new Mac.
 
More ram is definitely a necessity. Any machine with 1gb of ram be it on XP, OSX or Windows 7 is going to struggle with modern software and web browsing. Especially in a generation of multitaskers running a million things at once (Office, music, web browser etc.) I would install the max amount the machine can take and she should be good to go with finishing grad school.
 
TacticalDesire said:
More ram is definitely a necessity. Any machine with 1gb of ram be it on XP, OSX or Windows 7 is going to struggle with modern software and web browsing. Especially in a generation of multitaskers running a million things at once (Office, music, web browser etc.) I would install the max amount the machine can take and she should be good to go with finishing grad school.
Click to expand...

Agreed, even for the retina machines, 16GB straight up. Always Max the ram out on any machine;).
I used to have a Macbook 3,1 with 6GB of ram i believe ? The official supported is 4gb Max but i'm sure i saw online that they actually supported 6GB but I'm not sure if that was for the early AMBP's ?

Edit: Found it :), what model Macbook do you own ?
http://www.everymac.com/systems/app...-2.2-white-13-late-2007-santa-rosa-specs.html
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back