Worth an upgrade or time for a new one?

[SnorriSnorrison]

Hi,

My old Macbook (2,1; Intel Core 2 Duo; 2GB memory; OS X 10.4.11) is really starting to show its age. Is it worth looking into upgrades at all or should I be looking at a replacement?

Thanks in advance for your comments.

 

[benwiggy]

That's a 2007 MacBook. It will take a maximum of 3Gb RAM and run Lion 10.7.5.
You'll need to buy Snow Leopard, to get access to the Mac App Store, and then purchase Lion from there. (However, Lion has many radical changes to the user interface that some people don't like, so you may find Snow Leopard sufficient.)

You may want to investigate whether you can get an SSD for it. It's got a slow SATA connection (1.5 Gbps), and I have no idea whether newer SSDs will work on that or not. However, putting in a solid state drive will be a massive benefit to the speed of the machine.

Snow Leopard, some RAM, an SSD: there are all reasonably cheap. You may need to buy a new battery at some point, if you haven't already. Even so, that's much cheaper than a new laptop.

What do you do with it? If it's just surfing, email, playing music and typing up some Word docs, then it will do you proud for another couple of years.

But a new machine would be significantly faster, more responsive, bigger storage, etc, etc. Not to mention shinier.

 

[SanJacinto]

I love to get most out of a computer and I made the experience, that slugginess on a PC starts early compared to a Macintosh.
So, it doesn't surprise that you was able to use a five year old computer with a seven year old system till 2013. Due to the fact that you hadn't any problems until now I guess you are not performing that intense tasks.

So my advice, don't buy a new Macbook:
Get a SSD (maybe Crucial M4, 128 or 256GB)
Max out the RAM
Upgrade OS X

Regarding OS:
You have to buy OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) to get the App Store. If you get 10.6, try it for some weeks. In my opinion it's the most mature OS by Apple. Great memory management and really bullet proofed. At the moment my Mac is on an uptime of 94 days

Because your hardware is not the newest, 10.6 makes more sense than 10.7.

One important point:
Some Apps that work on 10.4.11 might not run on 10.7.
So if you have some old indispensable apps and don't need the latest OS (maybe because of a future iOS device), stay on 10.6.

 

[vistadude]

That's a pretty old notebook. I'd rather spend $600 and get a fast desktop or laptop then spend $300 to slightly speed up an old notebook. Plus your battery will probably die soon, so that's another $150.

 

[l.a.rossmann]

I wouldn't bother upgrading for one reason: CCFL screen.

CCFL screens look crappier and crappier with every passing day. I bet yours is yellowing like crazy after six years. I can't look at a used, glossy CCFL screen without getting a headache anymore.