When it first came out, I decided to install it on external harddrive to see how it runs on 2007 MBP before installing it on my Macbook Pro drive.
I have to say that it did run a bit warmer than it was with the Snow Leopard but trying out Mavericks has brought me to do something about my Macbook Pro, I had to clean the fans and removed the old heatsink paste, re-applied etc so MBP is running a bit cooler than before. I noticed that CPU is more or less the same with Mavericks, just that GPU is running a bit warmer with Mavericks than with SL.
With external harddrive I had a strange flicky issue, the fans kicked in and it become very noisy so I had to shut it down and booted up into Snow Leopard. It stopped but a while later when it began to warm up and then it kicked in again! It does that when MBP is warmed up after using it for half hour or so. It carried on like that for a few days until I was able to solve it.
I was unable to solve it with some SMC and PRAM resets, PRAM is probably unrelated but you never know and so I googled for this problem, some users were having this fan problem with their brand new 2013 MBP and it turned out that Apple were using two different brands of SSD which are Sandisk and Samsung.
So I thought it might be related to HDD so I did a Disk Utility disk permission repair on Snow Leopard but it didn't help but when I tried CCleaner to clear out the internet cache etc, the fan stopped spinning from the moment after I flushed out the caches, especially with Firefox's! It never re-occurred since then.
This led me to think that having a different brand of hard drive could be the main reason that some people were having problems with Mavericks and some do not have any problem even on same specific model. If anyone is having any slowness or overheating problem with Mavericks, harddrive might be worth checking out and also mention a brand/model of HDD when posting about Mavericks issues.
Although there is some negatives being talked about Mavericks, there is a few good things I have to say about Mavericks:
Overall, a fair play to Apple for bringing in Mavericks for free.
I have to say that it did run a bit warmer than it was with the Snow Leopard but trying out Mavericks has brought me to do something about my Macbook Pro, I had to clean the fans and removed the old heatsink paste, re-applied etc so MBP is running a bit cooler than before. I noticed that CPU is more or less the same with Mavericks, just that GPU is running a bit warmer with Mavericks than with SL.
With external harddrive I had a strange flicky issue, the fans kicked in and it become very noisy so I had to shut it down and booted up into Snow Leopard. It stopped but a while later when it began to warm up and then it kicked in again! It does that when MBP is warmed up after using it for half hour or so. It carried on like that for a few days until I was able to solve it.
I was unable to solve it with some SMC and PRAM resets, PRAM is probably unrelated but you never know and so I googled for this problem, some users were having this fan problem with their brand new 2013 MBP and it turned out that Apple were using two different brands of SSD which are Sandisk and Samsung.
So I thought it might be related to HDD so I did a Disk Utility disk permission repair on Snow Leopard but it didn't help but when I tried CCleaner to clear out the internet cache etc, the fan stopped spinning from the moment after I flushed out the caches, especially with Firefox's! It never re-occurred since then.
This led me to think that having a different brand of hard drive could be the main reason that some people were having problems with Mavericks and some do not have any problem even on same specific model. If anyone is having any slowness or overheating problem with Mavericks, harddrive might be worth checking out and also mention a brand/model of HDD when posting about Mavericks issues.
Although there is some negatives being talked about Mavericks, there is a few good things I have to say about Mavericks:
- It has bought a new lease of life into my 2007 Macbook Pro, bringing it up to date with latest software plus I can now finally use ooVoo (its support for 10.6.8 was dropped) and a few useful extras such as Reminders.
- Apple Map was surprisingly good, as the satellite map has the most recent snapshots and much clearer than Google's outdated satellite photos, it's almost as if you are flying above!
- I do notice the preview is a bit slower especially with a long list of files such as download folders but not really a big deal as it is a matter of less than a second or so and I can live with that as it is a brand new OS X which just come out.
- The scrolling of the webpages on Firefox and Safari, is smoother than SL and also the text is clearer and easier on eyes too. Also loads webpages more snappy.
- Typing responsive seemed to be much better than it was in Snow Leopard. SL just sometimes didn't register the first letter when I started typing so I did not have this problem in Mavericks which is a good thing.
- In Snow Leopard, I had sleep issues with MBP running warm when sleeping and it turned out that it has to do with Firefox so for a workaround, quit it before going sleep. Quite a different issue but I think it might have to be same with Mavericks too.
- My portable external DVD writer sometimes works and sometimes doesn't with SL so it works fine with Mavericks
Overall, a fair play to Apple for bringing in Mavericks for free.
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