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which OSX for an old iMac?

C

crazyworld

macrumors member
Original poster
Feb 4, 2007
54
0
Hi.

I am using an old iMac for the next month while i wait to buy a new mbp [when they are eventually released].

The iMac is old, it is a 2.4 Intel Core 2 Duo with 4GB of Ram, hd 250GB. I borrowed it off a friend & he said I can reformat it, etc so that I can get it to run as fast as possible for using Photoshop CS5 & Capture One, & very occasionally Final Cut.

So, what I want to know is: which Mac OS will make it run fastest? Am I best to put an older version of Mac OSX on it? If I put the latest OS on, will it make it slower & clunky or will it run smoother?

Can anyone with experience help? thanks.
 
Last edited:
cool, thanks for your input.. I will give it 10.6 snow leopard & see how it goes. ta!
 
I have an '06 MBP with 2.33ghz core duo and 3gb memory.
I am running 10.7.5 very well. It has been faster and is stability is just fine. In fact, I put a SSD drive in it and it runs faster than the day I bought it.

----------

My wife's '07 MB runs 10.7.5 and she pummels that thing more than I do. She has to run huuuge statistical dinosaurs like SPSS and there are no problems. Granted, SPSS is a little slow, but she has no problem with a big monitor hooked up and switches seamlessly between SPSS, Xcel, Word, PowerPoint, Safari and Chrome, email, pdf reader and a crappy cisco VPN package that connects her to her $h!t PC at work.

Just our experience. Good luck and enjoy the free loaner -- that's awesome.
 
crazyworld said:
Hi.
a 2.4 Intel Core 2 Duo with 4GB of Ram
Click to expand...

Mine is a 2.8 GHz Core 2 Duo with 4 GB. I'm running 10.6.8, which works great: always responsive and rarely crashes, even with Outlook, Mail, Chrome, iTunes and Word typically open simultaneously.

BTW, my choice is based on my preference for Snow Leopard rather than what the hardware can handle.
 
hi.

I asked this question about my old imac before mavericks came out - can anyone comment on how mavericks runs on a machine as old as this (intel core 2 duo 4gb ram, 2.4ghz 2008) ?

is slower/faster than with snow leopard?

thanks.
 
Well, Snow Leopard was like the XP of OS X, Lion was like Vista (horrible performance).

It's either Snow Leopard or Mountain Lion.

Mavericks...hmm, it runs okay on 16GB of RAM, but Mavericks is a huge RAM hog. With just 4GB of RAM (tested in a virtual machine and on a spare Mac Mini), the average free RAM is around 50-75MB.

On 16GB of RAM, I regularly get 7GB free (compared to ML's 11GB free on average).

On 32GB of RAM (my iMac), I get around 20GB free. So yeah, Mavericks is a memory hog (not sure whether it's a bug, or the way it handles compressed memory).

Give Mavericks a pass.
 
Snow Leopard (10.6.8) is fast and rock stable on my 2007 iMac that has only 4GB of RAM. I can't remember when it has ever froze or crashed.
 
crazyworld said:
hi.

I asked this question about my old imac before mavericks came out - can anyone comment on how mavericks runs on a machine as old as this (intel core 2 duo 4gb ram, 2.4ghz 2008) ?

is slower/faster than with snow leopard?

thanks.
Click to expand...

I'm running it on a newer computer, but can tell you the 4GB of RAM won't be an issue. Considering it is free I'd recommend backing everything up, upgrading to try mavericks for a while, and if the performance goes down too much you can always downgrade.
 
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