Late 2007 MacBook Pro - Upgrade to ML??

[angiz]

I have a MacBook Pro that I purchased in November of 2007. I am currently running Lion. I had to take it in to the Apple store a few months ago to have them wipe the hard drive and re-install the operating system for me because it was running slow and I was getting the spinning ball all the time.

My question is this. Is it a good idea for me to install ML? I know that often times, each release of a new OS, is more memory intensive than the previous version. If my machine already runs slow, does that mean that upgrading to Mountain Lion will just make it worse?

Has anyone already installed it on a similar MBP who can tell me how their machine is running since the upgrade??

Thanks!

 

[nandreetta]

I have the exact same machine. I'd actually say Mountain Lion runs faster than Lion in general. Safari seems much faster, but that could just be the latest version of Safari, which was just released for Lion as well. Mail is a bit slow, but I didn't really use it in Lion and only came back to it with Mountain Lion because Sparrow notifications weren't working correctly for me. It may have been just as slow in Lion.

In general, worth the upgrade even on such an old machine. You could probably swap out the hard-drive for an SSD for a minimal investment and never notice its age. That's my plan this year.

 

[angiz]

I have the exact same machine. I'd actually say Mountain Lion runs faster than Lion in general. Safari seems much faster, but that could just be the latest version of Safari, which was just released for Lion as well. Mail is a bit slow, but I didn't really use it in Lion and only came back to it with Mountain Lion because Sparrow notifications weren't working correctly for me. It may have been just as slow in Lion.

In general, worth the upgrade even on such an old machine. You could probably swap out the hard-drive for an SSD for a minimal investment and never notice its age. That's my plan this year.

My machine only needs to last me until May 2013 (when I graduate from college). After that I don't really have a need for a laptop. So I don't think I can justify to cost of swapping out the HD. But thanks for your thoughts on the new OS on such an old machine.

 

[dwman]

I have the exact same machine. I'd actually say Mountain Lion runs faster than Lion in general. Safari seems much faster, but that could just be the latest version of Safari, which was just released for Lion as well. Mail is a bit slow, but I didn't really use it in Lion and only came back to it with Mountain Lion because Sparrow notifications weren't working correctly for me. It may have been just as slow in Lion.

In general, worth the upgrade even on such an old machine. You could probably swap out the hard-drive for an SSD for a minimal investment and never notice its age. That's my plan this year.

Glad to see someone's experience on this. I have virtually the same machine and was wondering about installing Mountain Lion as well. I have a Seagate Momentus XT 750 GB SSD Hybrid that I installed recently and it's like a whole new machine, even with Lion. Just trying to decide if ML might slow it down though.