Question - Will a older OS make my mac run faster?

[Mad101daN]

I have a older macbook, 2GB of ram and just meets the specs for Lion.

It was running 10.6 before.

I have put Lion on and it runs ok. However it got me to thinking if it would run better with an older OS such as 10.5. The minimum requirements for 10.5 are a lot less than for 10.7.

I purely use this mac as a media centre attached to my tv. It sometimes stutters when playing large video files.

So my long winded question is, as all I need it to run is a browser, itunes and vlc would an older OS such as 10.5 help in any way?

 

[Cheule]

Lion is a ver .0 right now (10.7.0), I'd give it at least until 10.7.1 before I judged it speed-wise.

With that said, every version of OS X has gotten faster, not slower (I'm looking AT YOU Windows!). How do I know that is true? On my nearly 6 year old MacBook Pro Core Duo (32-bit processor, which sadly cannot run Lion) I have gone from OS X 10.4 Jaguar to OS 10.5 Leopard and finally 10.6 Snow Leopard. Each time I upgraded, I ran the comprehensive suite of benchmarks that XBench provides, and the score was higher each time.


FWIW, I have set up quite a few media servers on Macs, and stuttering is usually a result of poor media server software configuration, not OS X overhead. I've had 1080P high bitrate MKVs transcode on the fly without any stuttering on the first gen Macbook Pro 2.0ghz Core Duo I was talking about. That's the slowest Intel MacBook ever made.