Should I downgrade from El Capitan to Mavericks? (2009 MBP 13")

[131215]

I am using a fairly old MacBook Pro 13" that is a hand-me-down. It was running Mountain Lion when I got it. I upgraded it to Yosemite and recently to El Capitan. Both seem to run very slow.

I am debating whether to downgrade to Mavericks. I have looked at the various tutorials online on how to do it and feel fairly confident.

But, I would like a second opinion on if it is worth the time and energy.

Here are the specs of my MBP:

Model Name: MacBook Pro

Model Identifier: MacBookPro5,5

Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo

Processor Speed: 2.26 GHz

Number of Processors: 1

Total Number of Cores: 2

L2 Cache: 3 MB

Memory: 2 GB

Bus Speed: 1.07 GHz

Boot ROM Version: MBP55.00AC.B03

SMC Version (system): 1.47f2

PS: I looked at the requirements. 2 GB for El Capitan. I've been reading that Mountain Lion is a much better OS than Mavericks and it is listed in my purchased apps so I might just downgrade even further.

 

[Isamilis]

If possible try downgrade to 10.8 unless you have SSD installed, or even better 10.6.8 if you really concern on performance.

 

[felt.]

is there any reason your aren't creating a second partition and running both? storage costs what..one cent per gb?

 

[garirry]

Avoid downgrading to Mountain Lion, try Mavericks instead, as there are already many apps that are starting to drop support for ML. Anything below that is going to cause massive compatibility problems with modern software. Also, I highly recommend you upgrade to 4GB of RAM, that will improve performance quite a lot. The requirements are the same for anything Lion and later.

 

[prisstratton]

I would definitely say to go to Mavericks. I installed both Yosemite and El Cap on my MBP and they never performed as well as my Mavericks installation (and I think my specs are still pretty good - see my sig). Only trouble you will find is that Mavericks is not available in the App Store any longer and seeing as you said that you went from Mountain Lion to Yosemite, it will not be available to you. So, you need to find a friend that previously downloaded Mavericks as it will still be available to them in the App Store.