Upgrade my MacbookPro to OSX Mavericks

[tpenfield]

Yesterday, the little update window popped-up and said that I could upgrade my Mac to OSX Mavericks for Free . . .

So, I figured, what the heck, sure. . . . After about 2 hours of downloading and updating, it finished up its busy work. I did notice it seemed a bit slower, then I thought . . . should have read the minimum hardware spec's before doing this :facepalm:

It turns out that my Mac is at the bare bones minimum for Mavericks. So, I had to shop around to find some more memory (RAM) for the poor thing (It is coming up on 5 years old). It currently has 2 GB of RAM . . . so I ordered the 8 GB kit, which will max it out. Hopefully that will put some new life into this thing. . . . of course, then I should be thinking about the disk drive

 

[Volphin]

Re: Upgrade my MacbookPro to OSX Mavericks

Yep, that would push that MBP. What model do you have? Other World Computing has awesome SSD drives that kick these older MBPs into high gear. I upgraded an old A1211 MBP for my son (It maxes out at 4GB RAM) and it ran faster than my current MBP on Snow Lep.

There are a few bugs with Mav, and I have to really work to get to now hidden files to make system adjustments. LOL

 

[roscoe]

Re: Upgrade my MacbookPro to OSX Mavericks

I'm running an early 2008 Mac Pro desktop w/ 14 GB of ram.
Went to Mavericks about 2 months ago, not because I needed anything it had to offer, but because I wanted to stay current for support issues.

I have a couple gripes about some things they changed, but everything works.

One thing that is slow, when I click on bookmarks to save a new one, there is a 2 to 3 second delay before the drop down menu appears.
Only happens on bookmarks, nothing else.

I have a habit of saving lots of stuff to the desktop while working on projects. Photos, charts, text docs, graphics, whatever.
Over the years, I have found that when you have 80 or 100 items on the desktop, overall performance will slow down.
Clean up the desktop, and all is back to normal.

Hard drive is about full, so that will need to be addressed soon.

 

[tpenfield]

Re: Upgrade my MacbookPro to OSX Mavericks

Yep, that would push that MBP. What model do you have? Other World Computing has awesome SSD drives that kick these older MBPs into high gear. I upgraded an old A1211 MBP for my son (It maxes out at 4GB RAM) and it ran faster than my current MBP on Snow Lep.

There are a few bugs with Mav, and I have to really work to get to now hidden files to make system adjustments. LOL

I have the mid-2009 MBP 13" (2.26 Ghz) w/ 2 GB of RAM. Model MB990LL/A. It came up as the minimum configuration for Mavericks. So, I should have the 8 GB upgrade chips by mid-week. I'll have to think about the solid state drive as an upgrade. Not sure about the price/capacity curve on those yet. I bought my kid a new MBP last summer for law school and the mechanical drives were still the better bang for the buck.

 

[Volphin]

Re: Upgrade my MacbookPro to OSX Mavericks

I have the mid-2009 MBP 13" (2.26 Ghz) w/ 2 GB of RAM. Model MB990LL/A. It came up as the minimum configuration for Mavericks. So, I should have the 8 GB upgrade chips by mid-week. I'll have to think about the solid state drive as an upgrade. Not sure about the price/capacity curve on those yet. I bought my kid a new MBP last summer for law school and the mechanical drives were still the better bang for the buck.

I always though so too until I upgraded one. The speed was unreal. Plus, I've had 2 rotating drives fail in the same day. (Primary AND Backup) That was very unpleasant. No warning at all. I should have bought lotto tickets. I have a NEW 120GB 6G SSD sitting on my desk with nowhere to use it at the moment. LOL Motherboard failed on a MBP the day before it was supposed to be installed. Go figure...

 

[tpenfield]

Re: Upgrade my MacbookPro to OSX Mavericks

My memory upgrade has been on back order for the past few days. Fortunately, I got a shipment notice last night. Hopefully, I will have it on Monday.

Not sure what to do about the hard drive, if anything. Currently, I have 240 GB, and I would only want to upgrade if I can go with a 320 or 500GB. In the SSD types, those are a bit pricey. I could do a straight swap and stay in the 240 GB range for about $125.Pricing on the SSD drives seems very linear right now. I would imagine that it will change as the product goes through its maturity cycle.

 

[southkogs]

Re: Upgrade my MacbookPro to OSX Mavericks

There are some cool things that came with Mavericks, but on the overall I'm not as impressed as I had hoped to be. The last several OS upgrades seemed to be more significant improvements. My MBP was just purchased last year, and I chip out the RAM on mine when I get 'em (do a lot of 3D & Graphics work): it's been much more sluggish that I would expect.

I have a friend who has an older iMac like my desktop (maybe '07-ish) and he put one of the 240GB SSDs in it. Lightening! It's amazing how fast that thing is. I'm considering doing it at home mainly because I do all of my storage on an external drive.

 

[tpenfield]

Re: Upgrade my MacbookPro to OSX Mavericks

I received the memory upgrade today. The system was 2GB RAM, now is 8 GB RAM. much faster . . .

Now I got to think about bumping the hard drive . . . It is currently 240 GB with only about 70 GB available. SSD's are nicely priced in the 250 GB range, but a bit pricey in the 500 GB range. Maybe I'll wait and see if prices work their way down.

 

[tpenfield]

Re: Upgrade my MacbookPro to OSX Mavericks

Looks like my MBP is using about 3.5 GB of memory with a couple of things open concurrently. So, with the 2 GB RAM, it was probably doing a lot of paging to disk.

Now with the upgrade, it has 8 GB physical & 8 GB virtual memory . . . not using any of the virtual. :thumb: