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Can anyone advise what a stable OS version would be for my mid/late 2007 Mac Book Pro? I am running Snow leopard 10.6.8 and know I can upgrade to Yosemite but have my hesitations after reading many comments on blogs. I've started to notice the effects of Snow Leopard being fazed out and want to upgrade but don't want to kill my machine while doing with a OS thats too much for it. I also don't want to lose apps in the process due to incompatibility.

My basic specs are as follows:

Processor: 2.6 GHZ Intel Core 2 Duo Memory: 4GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM Hard Drive Capacity: 320GB (27GB available)

I need to upgrade to use apps like Teamviewer 10 for example (as it's not supported on 10.6.8) but as it is my machine has slowed down and hangs despite repairing the permissions, using maintenance in OnyX, using Preferential Treatment and DiskWarrior (I've not repaired the disk in DiskWarrior yet despite my graph showing 39% errors). I just don't want to upgrade too high and completely affect my computers performance. I am correct in assuming this? Any thoughts would be most appreciated!

Thanks

Paul

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  • First thing you need to do is clear some space on that drive, it's too full. Then get Disk Warrior to fix it. This all presumes you have a backup.
    – Tetsujin
    Commented Dec 16, 2014 at 8:10

2 Answers 2

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I actually have the very same machine. I started with Snow Leopard, since it originally had 1GB of RAM. After a bit of playing, I decided I liked the newer UI better and upgraded to Lion. Lion is a LOT better on this machine, very snappy, and has support for newer software from the Mac App Store. Unfortunately, some pre-Unibody MacBooks CANNOT be upgraded past Lion without hacks. Main reason being the graphics unable to keep up with the later 'beauty' introduced into the operating system.

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  • I have a very similar Mac (2.4 GHz instead of 2.6 GHz). Mid/late 2007; not unibody. I am currently running Yosemite. Never had to use any hacks to get the OS upgrades to install, and never had any problem running the OS, even with "the later 'beauty' introduced."
    – iynque
    Commented Jul 28, 2015 at 17:27
  • @iynque whoops, my bad!
    – Keaton Burleson
    Commented Jul 28, 2015 at 17:28
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I think 10.7-10.9 are all about the same on that machine so I don't see why not to install 10.9 Mavericks since it is latest and most polished of them with Aqua UI.

Yosemite while having some nice UI enchancement has some quirks regarding redraw speed. And is clearly not as polished as Mavericks.

For great speedup you might consider buying an SSD though. If you don't use Superdrive then you might just replace it with 9.5mm PATA to SATA Optibay and save on SSD size. If you go this way install HDD into Optibay adapter and SSD in place of HDD.

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