ML Performance Improvement Advice?

[0038396]

I have an Croe 2 Duo iMac from 2009. It's fairly slow.
First of all, I wonder if I should upgrade to Mountain Lion. It's not a huge deal for the new features, but if it improves performance, I would like to do it. Does it have any possible slowing down of the machine?
Secondly, and less important, what are some easy ways to speed it up? I'm thinking about adding RAM, but until then is there anything I can do? My hard drive has tons of space.
Thanks for any help!

 

[bob616]

I have an Croe 2 Duo iMac from 2009. It's fairly slow.
First of all, I wonder if I should upgrade to Mountain Lion. It's not a huge deal for the new features, but if it improves performance, I would like to do it. Does it have any possible slowing down of the machine?
Secondly, and less important, what are some easy ways to speed it up? I'm thinking about adding RAM, but until then is there anything I can do? My hard drive has tons of space.
Thanks for any help!

I would do a clean install of Mountain Lion. Zero out your disk as you are wiping it. This helps the system find bad blocks. After Mountain Lion is installed install all of your important applications first then copy over your data. This puts the most important things, your applications, on the outside of the hard drive. Things stored on the outside of the hard drive are significantly quicker to access.

 

[RobT]

I have an Croe 2 Duo iMac from 2009. It's fairly slow.
First of all, I wonder if I should upgrade to Mountain Lion. It's not a huge deal for the new features, but if it improves performance, I would like to do it. Does it have any possible slowing down of the machine?
Secondly, and less important, what are some easy ways to speed it up? I'm thinking about adding RAM, but until then is there anything I can do? My hard drive has tons of space.
Thanks for any help!

FWIW, I have a MacBook Pro late '08 Core 2 duo and have found a clean install of ML to be a nice performance improvement over both Snow Leopard and Lion.