Testing Lion on Macbook

[riko]

Hi Guys

I am thinking of upgrading to Lion but I am worried about the performace hit I would get on my Early 2008 2.4 Ghz Macbook. I have 4 gigs of RAM already installed but I was wondering if I could test lion on a spare HDD that I have.

What I would want to do is remove my current HDD and install my spare, install Lion from CD or USB and test out the speed. If I didnt like the performance I would just put my old drive with SL back in.

Would the above cause any issues?

Thanks for any help

 

[MR.BUTTON]

Reply

Sure,it will cause a little bit of problem, you definitely will loose some of the performance, but if you don't have a lot of things going on, it's ok. If you want to upgrade to lion, I recommend you to use this as your secondary computer. Hope this helps.

 

[riko]

Sure,it will cause a little bit of problem, you definitely will loose some of the performance, but if you don't have a lot of things going on, it's ok. If you want to upgrade to lion, I recommend you to use this as your secondary computer. Hope this helps.

Thanks for the info but what I meant was would swapping HDD's cause any problems? I just want to test lion on my spare drive before installing it on my main one. Does Lion alter the firmware or anything?

cheers

 

[MR.BUTTON]

reply

sorry for misunderstanding. oh, that won't cause an issue. but apple seems have an firmware update for lion... check your manual, it should be okay.

mid-2010 macbook 5GB RAM

 

[AcesHigh87]

I have the same model macbook but with only 2GB of RAM. Lion doesn’t run AMAZINGLY well on it but it runs decent so I would imagine you’ll be fine with 4GB of RAM.

Keep in mind though, you don’t gain a lot of the functionality from Lion. The Early 2008 macbook can’t use the new trackpad gestures or airdrop; among other things.

I know it doesn’t answer your question about the harddrive swap but just thought I’d add my opinion on how it runs in case that’s why you want to test it.

 

[minifridge1138]

When I wanted to test Lion, I installed it onto a 16GB thumb drive.
Then I booted off of the USB thumb drive.

My 2007 MacBook only has 2 gigs of ram, and it actually runs Lion just fine from the usb drive. Which shocked me for 2 reasons:
1) Lion is slower than Snow Leopard on my Mac Pro.
2) I"M BOOTING OFF OF A USB THUMB DRIVE.

I decided it wasn't worth updating my Snow Leopard partition just because the MacBook can't take advantage of the new gestures (which I don't want anyway).

Just another way you could try it out.

 

[riko]

When I wanted to test Lion, I installed it onto a 16GB thumb drive.
Then I booted off of the USB thumb drive.

My 2007 MacBook only has 2 gigs of ram, and it actually runs Lion just fine from the usb drive. Which shocked me for 2 reasons:
1) Lion is slower than Snow Leopard on my Mac Pro.
2) I"M BOOTING OFF OF A USB THUMB DRIVE.

I decided it wasn't worth updating my Snow Leopard partition just because the MacBook can't take advantage of the new gestures (which I don't want anyway).

Just another way you could try it out.

Cheers, that is weird that it ran so well from a USB drive. I do have a 16GB drive but I am using that as my lion install source so I think Ill stick with my spare HDD.

I don't really want to upgrade to Lion but as Mobileme is ending soon I need to transition to icloud

cheers