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Here is a report I found, it is not on same hardware as yours so the GPU performances might be different but newer than less. If the "eye candy" and the animations are not important to you, those can be turned off, thus freeing up system resources to be used for other things.īottom line is this.for a relatively tiny amount of money (and some surfing on ebay or amazon) you can extend the life of your computer a few more years with much more recent OS. You can even opt for two SSD's and mirror them (RAID 1) for redundancy or stripe them (RAID 0) for increased performance. There are kits available that can turn your DVD drive bay into a second hard drive adapter.
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You are going to want to do a nice clean install, not an upgrade here.įinally (and this one is optional), don't throw away that old hard drive.
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I can't begin to tell you how much a difference this makes not to mention battery life and less heat. More RAM means more space for your OS and applications to work in and less time being "swapped" to the hard disk. Officially, your Mac can to go to 8GB of RAM. If memory utilization is close to or at the top of its limit, chances are you are sending the overflow memory requests to the hard disk (swap). Open up Activity Monitor and leave it open as you go about your day. I'm suspecting you are seeing some performance slowdown if you are running out of memory. Here's my suggestion (and I have personally done this for a friend and they couldn't be happier) based on the fact you have a pretty good machine in your possession.įirst, upgrade your RAM. Upgrading to one that is pushing 4 years old now may not be the wisest move - especially if what you are doing centers around the web where the tech changes almost on a daily basis. It seems that you are running into compatibility issues because your OS is now too old. If squeezing out every nanosecond of response is key to what you are doing, then this is entirely a moot thread you should buy a new machine. Your CPU and GPU are not going to change so running comparative benchmarks against them with varying OS's tells you little. You have to ask yourself the question "is the performance increase/decrease worth the added functionality?"īetter yet, "Am I going to notice the difference?" You have to weigh the balance between increased functionality/usability/security of the new OS with the performance of the old.
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