Q: Best OS for MBP mid 2009
Hi,
I have 13" mid 2009 MBP running 10.6.8. I had not upgraded the OS until now as I feared the performance will go down as it only has 2 GB RAM.
However, it has now reached to a level where its just becoming painful to use the system, so I am planning the following upgrade:
1. Max out RAM to 8 GB
2. Swap out optical drive for 250GB SSD for OS and keep the old 160 GB Hard Drive.
What I am not sure is with above upgrade which OS will be best suited for my MBP? I was planning to put Mavericks as I have heard both Yosemite and El Captain will not run that smooth on an older version of the macbook pro. I would really appreciate if someone can advice which will be the best OS? I mainly use my laptop for word processing and emails and yes light room 4.
Also, should I swap the optical drive for the new SSD or the old HDD? (My optical drive doesn't work anyways). I was earlier planning to get 500GB SSD but then decided to go for 250 and save some money as I have 1 TB external hard drive which I use since I work on multiple machines most of the times.
Any other advice or point I should keep in mind during the upgrade?
Many Thanks
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8)
Posted on Feb 12, 2016 10:10 AM
dvinny wrote:
How do I do clean install of El Capitan on the SSD? I tried making bootable USB but no joy. The createmedia command doesn't work on 10.6.x (so i have been told) and neither does DiskMaker X. Any suggestions ?
I want to keep my old system as it is on the old spinning drive (including the OS) and make it dual boot using the SSD by installing El Capitan on it. This is to test if El Capitan would work as per expectation and if not then I will go back to 10.6.8 and enjoy my new SSD and RAM and forget about the OS completely.
I hope the above is a feasible plan, if yes please help !!
1st and foremost backup your system (2 backups to separate devices using different backup utilities would be ideal )
Booted from your 10.6.8 disk, you should be able to start the El Capitan install and then point it to your SSD so that you are doing a new install on the SSD.
The backups are so that if something goes wrong, you will still have a copy of your 10.6.8 system safely backed up.
Posted on Apr 13, 2016 10:23 AM