My girlfrind has this old Macbook pro, which I believe is from the second gen (2,1) of Intel Macbooks, running a 2Ghz Core2 Duo, 1GB of RAM and a hard drive with 80GB of capacity. She's still running Mac OS X Tiger (10.4.11).
She is complaining that her notebook is slow, and is asking me to help her do a complete re-format of the machine. She will backup everything she thinks is important before she gets the laptop to my home.
I do fairly well with PC's, but as for Mac's, I'm a little out-of-date, mainly due to my lack of the interest in the platform.
I'm thinking about buying her a license of Mac OS X Snow Leopard, and installing it. Is this a good idea? I'm really worried about installing this newer version, I don't know if it going to work well. She will use it mainly for browsing, IM'ing and Skyping. My colleagues that develop in Macbooks all upgraded their laptops to 4GB, and this must mean something.
I would like to know if you mac users also install anything as soon as fresh install your OS, apart from browsers and IM clients. Maybe media players, torrent applications, etc?
Thanks in advance,
Best Answer
I've got a slightly newer BlackBook and that's working quite well with Snow Leopard. I'd definitely upgrade from Tiger.
That said, you'd more likely get the best performance increase from stuffing as much RAM as possible in - I'd guess that would be around 4GB on that age MacBook.
Macs don't quite seem to collect as much 'fluff' as Windows PCs do so I'm not sure if you need to go to great lengths to do a full rebuild of the machine. I'd first upgrade the RAM and then to Snow Leopard.