New Mac User, should I upgrade to Mountain Lion

[gotgutz727]

Hey everyone,

so I just purchased a used macbook pro from a friend for my first mac. I am interested in upgrading to mountain lion. He recommended that you should only upgrade the software once to maintain peak performance and that it was upgraded from Leopard. It is a MacBook Pro 5.5 It was purchased in early 2010 so it is a mid 2009 Macbook Pro. It is currently running Snow Leopard I believe. Its system version is Mac OS X 10.6.8. It has 2 gb of ram and its processors are a dual core 2.26 ghz. I have 124.71 GB of hard drive space available. Ive looked up the requirements and they meet them but I know the recommended guidelines are not always accurate.

I think I listed all the necessary info, if I forgot something please let me know and I will do my best to find it.

Thanks for the help!

 

[snaky69]

Hey everyone,

so I just purchased a used macbook pro from a friend for my first mac. I am interested in upgrading to mountain lion. He recommended that you should only upgrade the software once to maintain peak performance and that it was upgraded from Leopard. It is a MacBook Pro 5.5 It was purchased in early 2010 so it is a mid 2009 Macbook Pro. It is currently running Snow Leopard I believe. Its system version is Mac OS X 10.6.8. It has 2 gb of ram and its processors are a dual core 2.26 ghz. I have 124.71 GB of hard drive space available. Ive looked up the requirements and they meet them but I know the recommended guidelines are not always accurate.

I think I listed all the necessary info, if I forgot something please let me know and I will do my best to find it.

Thanks for the help!

Lion and mountain Lion are both resource hogs compared to snow leopard, I strongly suggest you upgrade to at the very lest 4GB RAM if you intend to upgrade to either, else you're likely to see a massive slowdown.

Unless you truly need ML features, I would stick with Snow Leopard.

 

[1member1]

2GB of RAM is not enough in my opinion. i believe your disk is also 5400 rpm.

 

[gotgutz727]

Thanks for the quick responses. The main feature that I would be interested in is linking my iphone calendar with ical. Is there any way to do that? Ive googled it a little but most of the answers were related to icloud but I dont believe i can get the desktop software for it on my mac

 

[snaky69]

Thanks for the quick responses. The main feature that I would be interested in is linking my iphone calendar with ical. Is there any way to do that? Ive googled it a little but most of the answers were related to icloud but I dont believe i can get the desktop software for it on my mac

iCloud integration started with Lion, the features are built right into the OS, there is no software for it per se, it's simply integrated into the OS.

Alternatively, through iTunes, you can simply ask your iPhone to sync calendars with the Mac, that doesn't require iCloud at all, or even Lion or Mountain Lion. You just plug the iPhone in, go into the options and tell it to sync calendars between the computer and the phone.

As far as calendars go, iCloud simply alloys you to sync both calendars without actually syncing your phone with your computer through wi-fi or USB.

 

[James_C]

Your machine would be fine running Mountain Lion if you had 4GB of Ram, you can upgrade the RAM to 4GB. If you want to stick with 2GB I suggest you stay with Snow Leopard, which is one of most efficient versions of OS X Apple have released. You machine is capable of running Mountain Lion with only 2GB, but I would not recommend it.

 

[dusk007]

You can also use google mail or any such calendar supporting online service. They sync online all the time. I used to sync my cals long before iCloud showed up. Still not a fan on iCloud. It is simple to set up but that is about the only thing iCloud is good at. It basically brings online syncing to computar an-alphabets.

Just setting iTunes to auto sync over wifi and orderin it to sync cals usually does the trick just as well for most people. Requires 2 check marks and hit the apply changes button.

I would also recommend to stick with SL. Even with more RAM I still think it is better. ML constantly slows down with all animations once it is up a little while. Used to be buggy like hell and SL was simply faster and Expose+Spaces beats Mission Control any day.

 

[gotgutz727]

You can also use google mail or any such calendar supporting online service. They sync online all the time. I used to sync my cals long before iCloud showed up. Still not a fan on iCloud. It is simple to set up but that is about the only thing iCloud is good at. It basically brings online syncing to computar an-alphabets.

Just setting iTunes to auto sync over wifi and orderin it to sync cals usually does the trick just as well for most people. Requires 2 check marks and hit the apply changes button.

I would also recommend to stick with SL. Even with more RAM I still think it is better. ML constantly slows down with all animations once it is up a little while. Used to be buggy like hell and SL was simply faster and Expose+Spaces beats Mission Control any day.

Alright so I just checked my itunes and i have that set up already. how do i get the calendar from the iphone to ical though?

 

[gotgutz727]

Was able to figure it out now. Thanks for the info!