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Should My Laptop Be Upgraded to 10.11.X?

B

BrianJ844

macrumors member
Original poster
Dec 8, 2009
75
2
Houston, Tx
I have an early 2008 aluminum 13" MacBook that has an 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4 GB of RAM, and 160GB hard drive. It is my first Mac and I have kept thinking it would die (since I was used to windows laptops) and it never has. That is why I never thought to upgrade it. That and it is still as solid as when I bought it, runs well and no complaints. My only concern is the stoppage of security updates from Apple so am seriously considering upgraded to El Capitan.

Do yall think my specs are good enough for El Capitan? Would there be any serious pains with the upgrade? Would I have to reinstall everything from my time machine? Should I do a clean install and reinstall all through my time machine anyway? Would yall do the upgrade or just keep riding 10.6.8?

Thanks for the opinions,
Brian
 
An Early 2008 MacBook cannot upgrade to El Capitan, the latest would be OS X 10.7.5 (Lion)

However, you also say that your MacBook is aluminum. The early 2008 MacBook is still a plastic case.
The aluminum MacBook from Late 2008 CAN be upgraded to El Capitan (and can be upgraded to 8GB of RAM, which is also a good plan.)
You can double-check which MacBook you have by opening About This Mac from the Apple menu, then click on the More Info button. System Profiler will open, then tell us what the Model Identifier is in the Hardware tab.
 
BrianJ844 said:
I have an early 2008 aluminum 13" MacBook that has an 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4 GB of RAM, and 160GB hard drive. It is my first Mac and I have kept thinking it would die (since I was used to windows laptops) and it never has. That is why I never thought to upgrade it. That and it is still as solid as when I bought it, runs well and no complaints. My only concern is the stoppage of security updates from Apple so am seriously considering upgraded to El Capitan.

Do yall think my specs are good enough for El Capitan? Would there be any serious pains with the upgrade? Would I have to reinstall everything from my time machine? Should I do a clean install and reinstall all through my time machine anyway? Would yall do the upgrade or just keep riding 10.6.8?

Thanks for the opinions,
Brian
Click to expand...
You probably mean LATE 2008 MacBook, that one works with El Capitán. Considering it has 4GB of RAM, I think it should run 10.11 fine and with very minimal or no problems. The installer will automatically keep all your files and transfer them to the new install, so you shouldn't worry about that. If you're dissatisfied for some reason, I heavily recommend making a TM backup prior of installing it (in fact, you should do that always when you install a new OS), that way you could downgrade if you're unhappy. If you want to do a clean install though, you can boot into the recovery partition, which will appear after installing El Capitán. So, considering you're running such a (relatively) old OS, it's best to update as soon as you can.
DeltaMac said:
An Early 2008 MacBook cannot upgrade to El Capitan, the latest would be OS X 10.7.5 (Lion)
Click to expand...
To be more exact, 10.8.5 is the maximum after doing a hack, and it still runs better than its predecessor.
 
Yes sorry, early 2009 it is. I was counting the laptops age based on when I met my now wife back in college, and was off by a year... the Model Identifier is MacBook5,1.
 
:oops: It was bought from the refurbished store so late 2008 model makes sense... I should of googled 5,1 lol

Do yall believe a clean install would be worth the hassle?
 
No; As they say "don't fix, what isn't broken" 10.11 has been problematic for some and the spec of your Mac is borderline. Depending on your usage the security aspect is not too big an issue, if your seriously concerned you can always look to third party solutions to detect/block malicious code. Whatever your decision, you should ensure that the drive is backed and not solely with Time Machine.

Q-6
 
Upgrade to ssd and use the trimforce command and you will have a very speedy and responsive machine.
 
BrianJ844 said:
I have an early 2008 aluminum 13" MacBook that has an 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4 GB of RAM, and 160GB hard drive. It is my first Mac and I have kept thinking it would die (since I was used to windows laptops) and it never has. That is why I never thought to upgrade it. That and it is still as solid as when I bought it, runs well and no complaints. My only concern is the stoppage of security updates from Apple so am seriously considering upgraded to El Capitan.

Do yall think my specs are good enough for El Capitan? Would there be any serious pains with the upgrade? Would I have to reinstall everything from my time machine? Should I do a clean install and reinstall all through my time machine anyway? Would yall do the upgrade or just keep riding 10.6.8?

Thanks for the opinions,
Brian
Click to expand...
I have a late 2008 aluminum MacBook running 10.11.1 and I love it. Now I do have 8GB of RAM and an SSD in it, and it flies. I did a fresh install with with 10.11.1 when I installed the SSD, but worth the money for the performance. I hope to get a year or 2 more out of this now.
 
Last edited:
Well I decided to give it a go yesterday morning. The installation failed with the bar stuck about 85 - 90% and the beach ball spinning. Internet searches revealed it could be old .kext extension files causing the actual start up of El Capitan to fail. So I booted into recovery mode, used the terminal server to move all 10 of the .kext files to another folder. I booted again and the bar slowly progressed to about 70%, the screen flickered a but and changed shades of grey and there it stopped.

It had already been a long afternoon of learning how to move files in the terminal and my wife has some exams coming up at the end of this week so I used Time Machine to restore 10.6.8 back. That worked just fine but it didn't restore my downloads folder (maybe not included in the time machine backups?). Not a big deal but just found that interesting. I am also missing 15 GB of data from the computer but haven't found out where yet. Probably in indexes for spot light and stuff but still a bit puzzling.

I will probably give El Capitan another shot but will wait until Christmas vacation or sometime like that so I have more time to work on it. Also so maybe future released of 10.11.X might fix whatever is holding up my installation.

Brian
 
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