Upgrade to OS X 10.10 from 10.6.8

Question

Upgrade to OS X 10.10 from 10.6.8

I would be grateful for advice about upgrading my OS.

I have got a MacBook Pro bought in September 2013 in the UK which is running under OS X 10.6.8, with 2.26 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB of memory, and a 500GB hard drive, mostly unused. Some software I've just bought needs OS X 10.7 or later so I intend to upgrade.

Looking on the web, I think my machine can support OS X 10.10, and I gather that it's a simple, though lengthy process, to upgrade from the App Store. Since I'm starting from OS X 10.6.8 I understand it's free.

The important non-Apple applications I'm running are MS Office for Mac and Adobe Acrobat and Photoshop.

I'm running Time Machine to an external hard drive, so I understand that if anything goes wrong I can restore my system and data to what they were before.

Should I go to OS X 10.9 or earlier rather than 10.10? I'm unlikely to make much use of whizzy new features; performance is more important to me.

What can go wrong? What precautions should I take?

Seamus O'Connell

MacBook Pro

Posted on Feb 6, 2015 7:53 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Eric Root

Level 10

684,627 points

Feb 6, 2015 1:29 PM in response to Seamus O'Connell

Backups are important. I recommend a minimum of 2 as hard drives do fail.

Mavericks is no longer available. It was pulled after the release of Yosemite.

Lion apparently isn't getting security updates anymore.

Try Yosemite. If you don't like it you can then buy Mountain Lion

One option is to create a new partition (~30- 50 GB), install the new OS, and ‘test drive’ it. If you like/don’t like it it, you can then remove the partition. Do a backup before you do anything. By doing this, if you don’t like it you won’t have to go though the revert process.

Check to make sure your applications are compatible.

Application Compatibility

Applications Compatibility (2)

Mountain Lion

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Answer 2

Feb 23, 2015 6:05 AM in response to Eric Root

Thanks for this. I decided to go for Yosemite. I got it from the App Store. Download and installation went OK.

Afterwards I had to install a later version of Trusteer, the banking security application.

The machine was very sluggish at first, but improved after I ran Disk Utility Permissions Repair. But it's still not very nippy.

There is now a gap between two of the icons on the right-hand side of the menu bar. If I move the pointer over the gap I get a colour wheel. I can't remember what used to be there. Do you know how can I find out what's missing?

A serious problem is that there is now no search function in Apple Mail, i.e. I can't search for all emails from a particular person, or with specified text in the subject. Any thoughts on this?

Seamus O'Connell

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Answer 3

Allan Jones

Level 9

72,440 points

Feb 23, 2015 6:25 AM in response to Seamus O'Connell

Afterwards I had to install a later version of Trusteer, the banking security application.

Trusteer is the problem. There are hundreds of reports similar to yours where removing Trusteer restored normal opeation.

In spite of legitimate efforts on Trusteer's part, they have yet to make a product that is 100 percent Mac-friendly. You will have to tell your backing institution that you cannot use Trusteer. Banks are so Windows-centic that they have no idea that Trusteer is poison to Macs.

Want some data in case the bank wants to argue? Search any computer forum here for "Trusteer" or "Rapport" and you'll see long lists of problem reports. In every case where I've helped, removing Trusteer resorted normal operation.

In the "old" days, Trusteer Rapport only seemed the degrade Safari. Now it seems to have gone system-wide.

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Answer 4

Feb 25, 2015 12:40 PM in response to Allan Jones

I told my bank I had uninstalled Trusteer. They acknowledged that a lot of problems were reported with Macs. The machine might be a bit faster now.

By googling I found out that the colour wheel in the menu bar was where the Carbonite icon was missing. Carbonite had not been backing up my data since I moved to Yosemite. As advised by the Carbonite website I reinstalled it. Then restarted the Mac. The Carbonite icon was then present in the menu bar and Carbonite appeared to be working, though idle at that point.

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Answer 5

JimmyCMPIT

Level 7

29,258 points

Feb 25, 2015 1:35 PM in response to Seamus O'Connell

Photoshop CS (all versions) are technically not supported in Yosemite

that being said if you upgrade to Yosemite you will likely need to reinstall Adobe CS

you will also need to download and install Java as for Adobe CS and there are numerous reports of people getting into trouble with this step.

I did a clean install of Yosemite and didn't run into this problem but upgrading has mixed results.

You will also loose compatibility with all applications that require Rosetta (which was killed off in OS 10.7) so any older apps you may require not from apple might become unusable after an upgrade. If this is the case you may need to check the websites of those app developers to see if they offer a compatible upgrade.

you may also loose compatibility with your printer. Apple changed the security in the CUPS printing system and in some cases resetting the printing system will not fix this. Printer developers for many brands have not developed compatible drivers at this time and the workaround is to lower the security of the printing system which instructions to do so are routinely pulled from these forums for security reasons.

Some hardware such as cable modems are not compatible with Yosemite

Numerous reports of Wi-Fi dropping connections are also reported.

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Answer 6

Mar 3, 2015 9:04 AM in response to JimmyCMPIT

Thanks for the advice.

I upgraded iPhoto from the App Store. I’ve got Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Photoshop Elements; both appear to be OK. MS Office (Word and Excel) appear to be OK.

Incidentally, I can search emails in Apple Mail. I don’t know why I said earlier that I could not.

Performance is now generally poor. I wonder if it’s due to the applications I've got running. I removed Trusteer earlier. In the menu bar on the right I have icons for the following products (but it seems to vary from time to time and from account to account - I have four user accounts and one administrator account):

TomTom MyDrive Connect

Adobe Application Manager

Sophos Anti-Virus

DropBox

Carbonite Status (but sometimes I get the colour wheel instead)

Time Machine

What is an easy way to see what’s running on my Mac? The Activity Monitor shows a lot of processes but it’s not easy to interpret.

There are a lot of posts on the web saying that Carbonite does not work well with Macs. I had no problem under OS X 10.6.8 but it does seem likely that I’m getting problems under Yosemite – the colour wheel in place of the icon; the colour wheel when opening it in System Preferences; the Activity Monitor showing it taking vast amounts of CPU when it’s supposed to be inactive.

What products are recommended for web backup in place of Carbonite? I want something which runs automatically without me having to remember to do anything. And has good support - when I had a severe failure a year or so ago the Carbonite support staff were very helpful in sorting out the recovery, which was not straightforward for the Apple Mail files – for an additional fee, but not exorbitant and well worth it. I also have a PC and I run Carbonite on that; I’m not necessarily planning to replace it there.

Is Sophos worth having? I have heard criticisms. I realise that Macs are unlikely to be subject to malware (but that's changing) but I would not want to pass on a virus to someone else's PC unwittingly.

Another alternative product question: I find DropBox rather clumsy and sometimes confusing. I have at least two accounts which need to have their own DropBox-type folders on both Mac and PC (and iPad). And some (sub-)folders need to be shared between the accounts. I don't have very large files in the shared folders - text rather than photos). I would be grateful for recommendations.

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Answer 7

Eric Root

Level 10

684,627 points

Mar 3, 2015 10:30 AM in response to Seamus O'Connell

Performance Guide

Why is my computer slow

Why your Mac runs slower than it should

Slow Mac After Mavericks

Things you can do to resolve slowdowns see post by Kappy

Try running this program and then copy and paste the output in a reply. The program was created by Etresoft, a frequent contributor. Please use copy and paste as screen shots can be hard to read.

Etrecheck – System Information

Try un-installing Sophos.

Sophos Un-install

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Answer 8

dwb

Level 7

33,100 points

Mar 3, 2015 10:46 AM in response to Seamus O'Connell

Your Mac has 4GB of RAM which is one problem, with a standard HHD a 4GB Mac is going to run slow with Yosemite if you try to run many applications. Last year I received a 2012 Mac mini at work which had a standard HHD and 4GB of RAM. If I ran Safari and nothing else it was okay. If I ran Word and nothing else it was okay. But trying to keep DropBox, Mail, Word, and a couple more utilities running overtook RAM and virtual RAM with an HHD is slow - with a 5400 RPM drive it is really slow. Adding an SSD made all the difference in the world. Getting a RAM upgrade and just using the HHD was almost as good. Replacing the HHD with an SSD and the 8GB upgrade gave me a very nice computer. You are facing the same issue.

I'm not thrilled with any off site backup service simply because it is excruciatingly slow to restore data when its needed. I use a rotating set of external hard drives. One stays home during the week and goes into work with me on Friday. I bring the other home Friday. Right now with your RAM crunch any extra software is going to be a further drag on your computer. Unless you browse on the wild side, you don't need it.

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Answer 9

JimmyCMPIT

Level 7

29,258 points

Mar 3, 2015 10:46 AM in response to Seamus O'Connell

Sophos (along with several other Mac anti-virus programs) has been notorious speed vampire

the validity of being attacked by a virus on your mac depends greatly on your definition of virus and the sites you tend to visit. There are some malware packages out there, there are some "theoretical" attacks that show up more in labs trying to prove if it can be done than just out in the wild where you might stumble on them (all that could change tomorrow at least "theoretically")

If you run Parallels or Boot Camp or some other Virtualization software and have a windows partition by all means run some kind of anti-virus on your Windows partition but on Mac OS X you might try without it and see if the performance changes, and if so try and just use some common sense before clicking that e-mail from mom that says "Hello, click link for much happy!", if your web surfing habits tend to be casual and you don't look for trouble you tend to not find it but if you do get infected with malware keep a copy of some known utility that can remove it close by on a flash drive.

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Answer 10

Mar 8, 2015 12:40 PM in response to Eric Root

Many thanks to Eric, dwb, and Jimmy for all this information. I’m still digesting it, and the further information in the links within the links. I have made significant progress.

Right now I would be grateful for thoughts on further questions, in bold in the notes below. It's quite likely that these notes go into more detail than you want to read. If so, please just look at the specific questions.

GENERAL PERFORMANCE

I replaced my 4GB of RAM by 8GB from Crucial (arrived next day). It made a great difference. I’m now considering replacing my hard drive by an SSD. That would be tied in with a new strategy for backups, below, in which I could use the HD for a clone backup.

What might I have got wrong with the Apple Hardware Test? I held down D while restarting and while powering on but nothing special happened. The machine started up normally.

I uninstalled Carbonite. It kept getting the colour wheel in the menu bar and in System Preferences and used a lot of CPU even though it said it was idle. I might reinstall it if its problem with Yosemite gets sorted out – my subscription runs until August.

I had problems with Dropbox. They now seem to be cleared, not quite sure why. Seem to have to run it every so often to get it into the menu bar, then it disappears again.

SECURITY

Any suggestions for an anti-virus product on a flash drive which I could run from time to time? JimmyCMPIT suggests this. I got rid of Sophos, but I would like to be able to check for malware which affects Window machines – I also use a PC. ClamXav get lots of mentions but several reviews don’t think much of it.

I installed the Firefox add-on NoScript. I shall do my banking using Firefox with NoScript from a user account (which I would anyway), on both Mac and PC. NoScript is freeware but if it turns out to be as good as claimed I shall make a donation.

I cleared the download folders in all my accounts and will keep them empty.

I went through the settings in all browsers in all accounts – auto-update, checking options allowed, add-ons and plugins. And auto-update for OS and MS Office. On both Mac and PC I have four user accounts and an administrator account. On the Mac I have Safari and Firefox, on the PC IE, Firefox, and Chrome.

BACKUP AND RECOVERY

Two or three years ago my hard drive failed. I had to rebuild everything from scratch. I thought that since I had Carbonite it would not be much problem – I did not then have Time Machine. In fact it was quite difficult and took a very long time, even with very effective assistance from Carbonite support staff.

A bootable clone would save a lot of time. It seems to me that I would make a clone backup just before a major upgrade, in case the upgrade turned out to be unviable. Once the upgrade showed that it was stable I would overwrite the pre-upgrade backup by a post-upgrade backup to fall back to subsequently if necessary. After that I would every so often replace it by a more up-to-date backup. I’d keep it off-site.

Carbon Copy Cloner seems to be the popular choice.

If I bought an SSD drive could I put the current internal drive into an enclosure and use it for clone backups? Alternatively I could use an old external drive I’ve got.

What sort of SSD should I buy? The Crucial website lists several for my machine (MacBook Pro 13” mid-2009). The cheaper ones have slower write speeds, from 150 MB/s to 370 Mb/s. How significant would that be?

Will I have to deal with TRIM?

Is it possible to recover from the bootable clone then tell Time Machine to restore all user files created/changed since the date the clone was created?

One of Eric’s links suggests also making occasional off-site copies of important user data on non-rewriteable media, i.e. DVD-R. I could get everything important onto four disks.

I would set up a similar backup strategy for my PC, with Windows 7 built-in back-up and Carbonite taking the place of Time Machine.

Does the strategy below look sensible?

Mac:

Internal hard drive: SSD

Bootable clone: HD - before then after major upgrades

On-site contemporaneous user data backup: Time Machine on external HD

Off-site contemporaneous user data backup: None, unless Carbonite gets fixed

Non-rewriteable user data backups: 4 x DVD-R - say two sets cycling monthly, kept off-site

PC:

Internal hard drive: HD

Bootable clone: HD - before then after major upgrades

On-site daily user data backup: Windows 7 backup on external HD

Off-site contemporaneous user data backup: Carbonite

Non-rewriteable user data backups: 4 x DVD-R - say two sets cycling monthly, kept off-site

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Answer 11

Eric Root

Level 10

684,627 points

Mar 8, 2015 1:30 PM in response to Seamus O'Connell

If I bought an SSD drive could I put the current internal drive into an enclosure and use it for clone backups?

Yes.

Will I have to deal with TRIM?

Non-Apple drives don't handle Trim well, so no.

Backup strategy looks good to me.

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Answer 12

dwb

Level 7

33,100 points

Mar 8, 2015 3:50 PM in response to Seamus O'Connell

Apple Hardware Test Failure: your computer originally shipped with 10.6 which means the diagnostic test is on the original (grey) system disk that came with the computer. Did you have that in the optical drive when you restarted and held down the D key?

Security: for the Mac the best security is being careful about where you download files (MacUpdate.com has always proven to be safe) and browse. Google and Safari warn users about possible malicious sites and you should keep that feature on. Anti malware software depends on someone getting infected and the software companies quickly identifying and getting out a patch. That makes the user feel safe when s/he really isn't. When I am forced to use anti-malware software (as a guest at some universities for example) I install Sophos and then remove it as soon as I'm gone. We've generally found Sophos to have the least negative impact.

Backup: I recommend a TimeMachine backup and a clone backup. The clone gets updated prior to an OS update or upgrade or once a week. I also recommend another backup leave the home but be frequently updated. I don't recommend cloud backups due to how long they take to restore data.

Each of the computers I've upgraded with an SSD I've put the original drive in an enclosure and used as a backup. Since Apple doesn't support 3rd party Trim on Yosemite you needn't worry about it. Manufacturers of SSDs have their own garbage college and disk evening schemes.

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