What to do re 10.8? Many questions...

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Level 1

29 points

What to do re 10.8? Many questions...

I really want to upgrade to Mountain Lion.

I'm currently running Snow Leopard (which is very smooth indeed - almost no problems at all) on my late 2009 MBP which has a 2.53GHZ Core 2 Duo Processor and 4GB RAM.

Many Mountain Lion features appeal to me - particularly iCloud, Notes, Reminders and iMessages.

However I'm worried about a number of things:

Battery Performance. I've heard many people complain about their battery performance after upgrading to Lion, and as far as I can tell so far, the situation does not appear to have been greatly improved by Mountain Lion. What are people's experiences with battery performance on Mountain Lion?
Expose/Active Screen Corners. I LOVE being able to move my mouse to a corner and immediately show the desktop/all windows/put my monitor to sleep etc. Can somebody please confirm that these features are still available in Mountain Lion?
System Performance. As my computer is a little older now, I'm worried that Mountain Lion will be 'sluggish' on my machine. I would not want to compromise smooth system performance for a few extra (albeit cool) features. What are people's thoughts on how my machine would handle Mountain Lion?

Thanks very much in advance for any advice!

MacBook Pro (15-inch 2.53 GHz), Mac OS X (10.6.8)

Posted on Aug 3, 2012 4:39 AM

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Answer 1

Denico

Level 3

670 points

Aug 3, 2012 4:55 AM in response to Richard_432

Hi...

I installed ML on my mid 11 air. No problems.

I get the same batt. time as on lion.

Hot corners are still there as in lion.

Note however, i did a clean install. No upgrade.

IMHO many people have issues due to upgrading rather than clean install.

/Dennis

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Answer 2

Barney-15E

Level 10

123,020 points

Aug 3, 2012 5:00 AM in response to Richard_432

I really don't know what my battery performance on my mid-2010 MBP was, but it gets about five hours, now.

I feel like ML doesn't cause it to get so hot as Lion did. So, they may have improved things over Lion. It's been way to long since I used SL on this, though, to try and compare.

Exposé/Spaces is completely revamped in Lion/ML. There are never-ending diatribes by people who loved Spaces and abhor Mission Control. The "All Windows" feature is one of the many complaints. It stacks windows of an app together (which can be turned off in ML), and it doesn't show minimized windows in that view. The other thing it doesn't do is show a usable view of what is on the other Desktops (read spaces). So, in the All Windows view, you don't really see all windows like you are used to. You can show all Application Windows, which does show minimized windows.

Beyond all that and answering your question, the hot corners still exist:

(Hmm, I must have been holding down the cmd-shift keys when I snapped that)

ML feels snappier than Lion. But, again, I haven't used SL on this Mac in quite a long time so making that call is kind of tough.

If you can afford the $20 to check it out, and you have an external drive to use, you could just install on the external and boot to that to see what you think.

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Answer 3

Aug 3, 2012 5:17 AM in response to Richard_432

Hi Richard

I'm running ML on the same machine as the one you have. I'm happy to report that most of the issues I was having with Lion have been resolved in ML. Specifically re your questions:

- battery performance: not affected by ML

- Exposé/active screen corners: Exposé still does that annoying thing of stacking windows instead of showing them all separately - but I can live with that. Hot corners still work fine.

- System performance: excellent, but on condition you max out your RAM from 4GB to 8GB. This is the most important thing you should do. RAM is not very expensive these days - but you should buy it from a reputable source, such as Crucial. You will find the Crucial website very helpful. Installing it is a piece of cake and there are plenty of YouTube videos to walk you through the process. In fact if you run into any trouble (as I did) you can call Crucial on a Freephone number and a human being will very patiently help you.

The other, equally important, thing you should do is make a full bootable clone of your existing set-up, to an external hard drive. That way, should anything go amiss, you have a parachute. For cloning, I would recommend Carbon Copy Cloner.

Good luck !

PS I also have Snow Leopard on a separate partition that I can boot into if I need to.

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