Upgrading: most responsive, stable macOS for MBP9,2?

[fedeforos]

Hi, all. I am trying to update this machine for a friend. In your experience:

1. Which would be the most responsive, stable macOS for MBP9,2 as per the pics attached?

2. Is there any particular hardware upgrade worthwile, or simply not worth the pain for the price and trouble involved?

I am no techie, but willing to follow any reasonable avenues suggested, including a particular OCLP patcher, and Mr.Macintosh videos.

Thank you very much in advance for your replies.

 

[pacmania1982]

Get some more RAM in it ASAP. Looking at this: https://everymac.com/systems/apple/...re-i5-2.5-13-mid-2012-unibody-usb3-specs.html it would appear that the machine supports 16GB RAM. This should be cheap to max out these days.

Also if you can, find an SSD and replace the drive inside. Doing both of these shouldn't be too expensive and give this machine a few more years.

Catalina is the latest OS that this machine would support and with an SSD and more RAM, I would expect it to perform adequately. I'm not a lover of running software on unsupported hardware. Especially if it wasn't my machine.

 

[fedeforos]

Get some more RAM in it ASAP. Looking at this: https://everymac.com/systems/apple/...re-i5-2.5-13-mid-2012-unibody-usb3-specs.html it would appear that the machine supports 16GB RAM. This should be cheap to max out these days.

Also if you can, find an SSD and replace the drive inside. Doing both of these shouldn't be too expensive and give this machine a few more years.

Catalina is the latest OS that this machine would support and with an SSD and more RAM, I would expect it to perform adequately. I'm not a lover of running software on unsupported hardware. Especially if it wasn't my machine.

Many thanks for both pieces of advice!