Running El Capitan on late 2011 macbook pro

[ZD8062]

Hey all, I've got a late 2011 13" macbook pro with 4gb ram and the standard 500gb hard drive. I'm leaning towards making the investment in an SSD, but haven't pulled the trigger quite yet. I'm currently running Mavericks. It runs very smoothly 95% of the time with occasional slowdowns. When Yosemite was released, I tried upgrading. I was running it for a few weeks and it was so slow my computer was almost unusable. I reverted back to Mavericks and ran perfectly fine again. I want to upgrade to El Capitan, but am hesitant with my Yosemite experience. I know the modern OS's are meant to run on SSD's, however, I thought the system requirements for Mavericks and Yosemite were the same, thus I shouldn't have experienced that much of a slowdown. My point is, will my standard HDD be able to run El Capitan? Has anyone without an SDD tried upgrading? I don't need it to be incredibly fast, but I'd like to take advantage of some of the newer features such as iCloud drive that aren't built into Mavericks.

Thank you!

 

[fisherking]

Hey all, I've got a late 2011 13" macbook pro with 4gb ram and the standard 500gb hard drive. I'm leaning towards making the investment in an SSD, but haven't pulled the trigger quite yet. I'm currently running Mavericks. It runs very smoothly 95% of the time with occasional slowdowns. When Yosemite was released, I tried upgrading. I was running it for a few weeks and it was so slow my computer was almost unusable. I reverted back to Mavericks and ran perfectly fine again. I want to upgrade to El Capitan, but am hesitant with my Yosemite experience. I know the modern OS's are meant to run on SSD's, however, I thought the system requirements for Mavericks and Yosemite were the same, thus I shouldn't have experienced that much of a slowdown. My point is, will my standard HDD be able to run El Capitan? Has anyone without an SDD tried upgrading? I don't need it to be incredibly fast, but I'd like to take advantage of some of the newer features such as iCloud drive that aren't built into Mavericks.

Thank you!

i have a same-era macbook pro, and am loving 10.11. a few things: an ssd will make most of a difference booting up, opening apps. what you really should consider is doubling your ram. 4gigs is just not enough these days. ram will make more of a difference that just getting an ssd (tho both are good options )

 

[ragu]

I even have a 2010 MBP 15" Quad core I7 anyway I have 2 SSD's in this baby a Samsung 750gig SSD for main OS and an extra 500gig Crucial I use for extra storage boots up really fast glad I did this upgrade years ago.. PULL the TRIGGER LAD

 

[simon lefisch]

Hey all, I've got a late 2011 13" macbook pro with 4gb ram and the standard 500gb hard drive. I'm leaning towards making the investment in an SSD, but haven't pulled the trigger quite yet. I'm currently running Mavericks. It runs very smoothly 95% of the time with occasional slowdowns. When Yosemite was released, I tried upgrading. I was running it for a few weeks and it was so slow my computer was almost unusable. I reverted back to Mavericks and ran perfectly fine again. I want to upgrade to El Capitan, but am hesitant with my Yosemite experience. I know the modern OS's are meant to run on SSD's, however, I thought the system requirements for Mavericks and Yosemite were the same, thus I shouldn't have experienced that much of a slowdown. My point is, will my standard HDD be able to run El Capitan? Has anyone without an SDD tried upgrading? I don't need it to be incredibly fast, but I'd like to take advantage of some of the newer features such as iCloud drive that aren't built into Mavericks.

Thank you!

I have a late 2011 15" MBP and I just recently upgraded from an HDD to an SSD. While on Yosemite my MBP ran fine. Granted it was a 7200rpm HD, but it still ran great. Even on El Capitan my MBP was fine. After upgrading to an SSD, my MBP is fast. Boot time is about 15 seconds as compared to 50 seconds on an HDD. I would def recommend upgrading to an SSD, especially if you're running the stock 5400rpm HDD. Also, def upgrade your RAM. I have 16GB and got it for pretty cheap off crucial.com.

 

[e93to]

I updated my mid 2009 MBP from Snow Leopard to El Cap last week (my intention was to try El Cap before wiping the HDD and fresh-installing Snow Leopard). My MBP has 250gb HDD, 4gb RAM and Core 2 Duo 2.53. Yeah... It's now considered ancient.

However, I was surprised that El Cap ran fine. I used it for a day as I normally would, and I haven't encountered glitches/bugs. I have quite a lot of stuff installed, and animations were smooth. Softwares ran mostly fine, although some had stutter here and there. Sure, it was not as fast as Snow Leopard on my MBP, but it isn't something I would call slow or laggy. Most importantly, the fans did not run at max RPM all the time. For me this was the most impressive aspect of El Cap. Even after hours of use, the fans were mostly at 3000rpm range. At many points, the fans settled down to idle (2000), and stayed there for extended period of time. On Mavericks partition with nothing installed, my MBP overheated all the time, and fans kept spinning at max rpm.