11-22-2015, 09:25 PM
Grateful11 wrote:
[quote=Onamuji]
[quote=Grateful11]
How about a mid 2012 MBA 1.8Ghz i5 with 4Gb of RAM? I'm running Yosemite now and it seems to handle it fine.
#1 You already have a SSD.
#2 That ain't no Core 2 Duo.
Mid-2012 and later Macs have the GPU horsepower to deal with Yosemite reasonably well. (Could still speed it up a bit by ticking the "Reduce transparency" box in the Accessibility settings.)
You're still short on RAM, but so long as you're not doing much more than word processing or web browsing -- and you don't habitually leave Chrome up all the time -- you may not notice because when you use virtual memory your SSD is taking up some of the burden and it doesn't slow down your Mac to the same extent that a hard drive does. Even so, play a couple of hours of shows from Hulu or do a bit of work in any of the core Creative Suite/Cloud apps and you'll see your Mac slow down conspicuously from lack of "real" memory.
Thanks.
I did a Clean Install of Yosemite. Is that also the best way to do El Capitan?
It's hard to wrong with a clean install, but so long as your backups are reliable and up to date there's not much risk from an upgrade when you're going from Yosemite to El Cap.
Biggest problems to look for: 'Seems that every second antivirus product causes boot problems in El Cap - uninstall any AV products before upgrading. And it'll disable many menubar apps and Finder hacks. Make sure that any apps you run frequently will run under El Cap or have updates for El Cap.