03-29-2012, 07:12 PM
Tiger is probably your best friend, as is.
With 3GB max RAM, and integrated graphics sucking a piece of that, too, it doesn't give you tons of head room.
Leopard and SL are nice, but to de-beachball the laptop, you likely need to toss in a SSD if you're gonna run w/ them. Lion will be too much of a fight to try to tame; way more trouble than it's worth.
A speedier HDD may help a bit, as the stock drives were pretty sluggish, and the bus is only SATA I, but if you're gonna pop the top, a small, 60/90/120GB SSD will easily max out your real life I/O throughput, then maybe use an external FW drive for extra data beyond what you carry on the SSD.
Some Mac laptops have more room to "grow" than others.
Good luck.
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With 3GB max RAM, and integrated graphics sucking a piece of that, too, it doesn't give you tons of head room.
Leopard and SL are nice, but to de-beachball the laptop, you likely need to toss in a SSD if you're gonna run w/ them. Lion will be too much of a fight to try to tame; way more trouble than it's worth.
A speedier HDD may help a bit, as the stock drives were pretty sluggish, and the bus is only SATA I, but if you're gonna pop the top, a small, 60/90/120GB SSD will easily max out your real life I/O throughput, then maybe use an external FW drive for extra data beyond what you carry on the SSD.
Some Mac laptops have more room to "grow" than others.
Good luck.
///