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Level 1

12 points

Upgrade iMac mid 2007 or buy a New iMac?

Hello,

I have a mid-2007 iMac running OS X El Capitan 10.11.6 It has a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor and 4GB of memory. My HD has 188 GB of 319 GB free space.

Everything runs perfectly except my Adobe Lightroom program is very slow as I just bought a new camera and my RAW images are around 25 mb each. Importing/exporting and manipulating them takes forever and my color wheel spins a bit before a change is seen. Very frustrating when I try to edit over 200 pics

Is it time to buy the new iMac or would getting a new internal hard drive help? Are processors and the amount of RAM more important when working with graphics?

Any other related suggestions would be appreciated.

iMac, OS X El Capitan (10.11.6)

Posted on Mar 1, 2018 1:03 PM

Best reply

Limnos

Level 10

411,163 points

Posted on Mar 1, 2018 4:24 PM

4 GB RAM is on the low end when it comes to graphics and video work. It's even low for running a newer OSX.

Hard drives is many Macs run at a slower spin speed of 5400 rpm. If you really want speed you need a SSD but those are a lot more pricey per GB.

Your processors are okay. Not the fastest but many in Apple's current lineup are similar GHz.

Adobe is going to be a hog. Tweaking anything will help, but is it worth it with a 11 year old Mac? Apple would say not, they stopped supporting it 6 years ago. I'd say you need to look at the cost. If you do something like RAM alone and you do it yourself then maybe. Doing a HDD on an iMac can be like brains surgery. You've also reached a point where you can't upgrade OSX beyond what's already an old version for Apple (and probably Adobe too). If you want major tweaking done and you can't DIY then you may be better off thinking a new(er) Mac in terms of price point. You could easily toss several hundred into upgrading that one and it still wont' run a newer operating system version.

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MichelPM

Level 10

80,958 points

Mar 3, 2018 7:36 PM in response to joela21

Okay,

With those storage amounts, on a 256 GBs SSD, minus formatting and the OS, the would leave you approx. 110 GBs or so, of which you would always need to leave between 15-20 GBs for the OS.

So, you would have approx. 90-95 GBs of actual free data storage space left on a 256 GBs SSD.

joela21 Author

Level 1

12 points

Mar 11, 2018 2:17 PM in response to MichelPM

thank you

On Saturday, March 3, 2018, 10:17:49 PM EST, Apple Support Communities Updates <discussions-updates@apple.com> wrote:

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