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Upgrading a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo to Mavericks?

K

kat.hayes

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Oct 10, 2011
1,448
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I have a Macbook Pro 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4GB 667 MHz DDR2. It is running 10.6.8

1. Can I upgrade this to Mavericks? Would it run OK or would it run slower by upgrading to Mavericks?

2. I would like to completely wipe it first. How do I wipe it before installing Mavericks?

Thanks.
 
Second on the upgrades!!!

I put 8GB and a 500GB SSD in the niece's white MacBook and upgraded it to Mavericks. Boot time and app start times dropped tremendously.
 
jbachandouris said:
You may want to consider upgrading to 8GB or an SSD drive though.
Click to expand...
MCAsan said:
I put 8GB and a 500GB SSD in the niece's white MacBook
Click to expand...
I'll third the SSD suggestion (and unless you want to carry your whole life with you then a 240–256GB SSD will be absolutely fine) but this particular baby isn't going beyond 6GB of RAM.

If it's not going to be doing anything particularly RAM-thirsty then I'd be tempted to install the SSD and see how you get on with the existing memory. A 4GB PC-5300 module is pretty much the same price as the SSD, and upgrading both disk and memory is quite an investment in a 6–7 year old laptop.
 
Put a 120GB SSD and the SATA bus will be the bottleneck. The SSD will run as fast as your SATA controller will allow. Then do a clean Snow Leopard installation, upgrade it to 10.6.8. I would only upgrade to Mavericks in the following situations:

1- Your RAM is becoming a bottleneck. Mavericks compresses RAM, so you'll maybe get an additional GB without swaping to secondary storage.

2- You need more battery life. I feel my white late-2009 Macbook got an extra hour of battery life after upgrading.

3- You don't need nVidia CUDA working. nVidia doesn't provide CUDA drivers for old GPUs on Mavericks. At Snow Leo, you can have CUDA working.

4- You don't need Snow Leo specific software. I needed paying for upgrading my Crossover license, since my version didn't worked on Mavericks.
 
See my signature below. Mine runs fine and I doubt you would see the difference between 4 and 6 GB unless you run some heavy applications.

Some says Mavericks runs much better on SSD than HDD but for me, it seems fine to me. Applications opening about the same as SL.

However, since Mavericks is free, I guess there's no harm in installing it before you can part your cash for upgrades.
 
kat.hayes said:
I have a Macbook Pro 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4GB 667 MHz DDR2. It is running 10.6.8

1. Can I upgrade this to Mavericks? Would it run OK or would it run slower by upgrading to Mavericks?

2. I would like to completely wipe it first. How do I wipe it before installing Mavericks?

Thanks.
Click to expand...

My girlfriend uses that exact same computer with Mavericks without issue.
 
EDIT - AH, MacBook PRO not regular MacBook.

Forget everything I said. It's late, I'm going to bed.
 
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