El Capitan on October 2009 Mini

Compman55

Golden Member
Feb 14, 2010
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I have pretty much abandoned the snow leopard and use windows 7 for my HTPC mini. What is everyones recommendation on upgrading to El Capitan. Some say it slows sustems down, some say it speeds up. Thoughts?

For some reason apple is no longer offering any security patches for snow leopard so I am nervous about using it on the internet. This was an excellent OS back in its day, that is for sure.
 

Tyranicus

Senior member
Aug 28, 2007
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I run El Capitan on a late 2008 MacBook Pro with no major slowdowns. That said, it has an SSD and 8GB of RAM.
 

Tyranicus

Senior member
Aug 28, 2007
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It will probably run fairly well. You will see a notable improvement if you upgrade to an SSD though.
 

Tegeril

Platinum Member
Apr 2, 2003
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I have this setup but I swapped in an SSD. Be aware that the Nvidia chipset will not negotiate a SATA-II connection for all SSDs. I had an Intel SSD that would only run at SATA-I speed and ended up picking up an older Crucial M500 SSD that ran at SATA-II. Also got one of the second drive bay kits and removed the combo drive so I could slap a 1TB WD Red in it as well.

Pretty slick system given its age. GPU is definitely its weak point, but as a box I can remote into from anywhere that I can code on or have host something, it's pretty great.
 

Compman55

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Feb 14, 2010
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I upgraded over the weekend and it is a little different of an OS that is for sure. What I notice is that there is a little more stuttering especially when clicking on the application folder watching it come up. On a newer mac it is smoother.