[X4U] Can my iMac handle OS 10.7?

[Neil Laubenthal]

On Jan 16, 2012, at 9:28 PM,1/16, Nick Scalise wrote:
> I'm not sure what you are disagreeing with. The statement where I said 4gb may not be enough or where I said it was definitely not enough for me.
> 
> Just for the record, when i experience slow downs, the apps I have open are: Photoshop CS3, Extensis Portfolio, Entourage 2008, NetNewsWire, Safari, Adium, BBEdit, and occasionally word and excel. However word and excel are not required to be open to experience slowdowns. Notice final cut is not on that list. So 'heavy duty video' is not the issue.
> 


Just offering a dissenting opinion on the viability of Lion in 4GB. If the original poster made a decision based solely on what works for you he might conclude that Lion is not appropriate for his machine . . .with dissenting opinions he can take both of them into account and make his own decision. Obviously I'm not going to disagree with your conclusion that for you 4GB is not enough . . .but the poster should hear dissenting opinions. If I was to hazard a guess . . .I would say that Entourage was likely a major contributor to your performance issues . . .I've tried it myself and found it to be a dreadful performer, hence I stick with Mail and occasionally Thunderbird since all my mail accounts are IMAP. I may have misinterpreted that you were using video . . .but other then Entourage I the list of apps you're running doesn't seem all that bad; so if you are having performance issues then maybe there's another cause. Without knowing the specifics of your case . . .did you clean install or upgrade, do you have older versions of software that might be compatible but haven't been fully upgraded for Lion, etc . . .I don't think there's anything obvious there beyond maybe Entourage. Given that you're seeing issues . . .it might be worth some additional troubleshooting to make sure it isn't something other than a RAM issue.

I recently had to reload the OS on my wife's non SSD MBP . . .it's the Core 2 Duo model before the Unibody frame although it has been upgraded with a 7200 RPM Seagate Momentus drive. She had some unrepairable disk corruption . . .so I just did a clean install of Lion after reinitializing the drive, copied her home directory back before creating the user account so it's permissions would get set correctly, and reinstalled only the apps she uses. Post rebuild . . .performance is significantly better than before . . .which was a Leopard upgraded to Snow Leopard upgraded to Lion (all in place upgrades) OS. That's likely not the case for your late '11 unibody MBP . . .but either there's something different about your setup or else your tolerance for performance slowdowns is a lot higher than mine . . .and I'm pretty picky:-)

You could also buy more RAM . . .it is pretty cheap ($50 for 8 GB from OWC) . . . as we were frequently fond of saying when I was a sysadmin before retiring last August . . . God has enough RAM, the rest of us are just making do. I would probably put 8 in anything new I bought if possible . . .but will likely have to settle for 4 as I will probably get an Air for RV living and travel now that we're retired.

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There are only three kinds of stress; your basic nuclear stress, cooking stress, and A$$hole stress. The key to their relationship is Jello.

neil