Upgrading My MacBook from El Capitan to Sierra or High Sierra

[TheShortTimer]

Well, I'll never know. After the first one, I closed everything out and then set a speed record in wiping a drive.

I still remember the dozens of galleries of swingers porn featuring a client's former next door neighbour who'd forgotten to check and erase a laptop before donating it to the family. Goodness.

 

[Jack Neill]

Ive ran 10.10 to 10.15 on my 5,2. Right now its on 10.11 but I think my fav was 10.12 as it was my first unsupported effort and it was fun to do. I would go with 13 and a SSD and it will be a great machine. My specs in mine are 2.0/8/512.

 

[Aoligei]

I actually got an 2009 13" MacBook Pro with 4GB of RAM and 240GB Hard Drive with 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, which I believe is the upgraded processor for $40 dollars

I have few DDR3 RAM sitting around and brought a cheap 120GB SSD. Used my 2020 MacBook Air to get the patched Catalina USB installer, installed Catalina on this machine.

This machine is everything $40 dollar laptop can do. Browsing web, no problem. Playing FHD video, no problem. Viewing large PDF file, no problem. Small video editing no problem.

I would strong recommend to try Catalina, since it is still kind supported by Apple, although won't be long.

The main reason to go for newer OS is because of software support. El Captain software support is kind non-existence right now. Heck, I can't get major website opening with every single browsers i have tried. Always give me this website is not secured message.

Catalina runs fine, however, I run into issue where applications are crashing. After some digging, it seems related with software signatures. I have to disable AMFI, but according to forum, this will disable all basic securities.

I don't know how useable this machine is in 2022, I certainly won't use this machine with any sensitive informations, like log into my online banking.

 

[TheShortTimer]

Not a variant of Firefox, but I use Vivaldi, which uses Chrome extensions.

I have not found a Chrome extension that does not replicate what I had in TenFourFox/Firefox.

It's really pretty good and updated rather frequently. It's from one of the original developers of Opera.

@eyoungren - thanks so much for this recommendation. After Firefox locked up my MBP for the umpteenth time last night, I installed Vivaldi and made the switch and not only have my problems vanished but I've also witnessed a drastic increase in functionality. Previously I was dependent on using two browsers simultaneously but neither of them met my needs adequately. Vivaldi fulfils this role and more - within just one program.

I was able to import my bookmarks and browser history from Firefox quickly and easily. My passwords required a bit more work with the help of the freeware FF Password Exporter which created a .CSV file that Vivaldi could then import via the following steps:

To import passwords from .csv file:

1. Go to vivaldi://flags and search for #password-import;
2. Enable the experimental feature;
3. Restart the browser;
4. Type “chrome://settings/passwords” into the Address field;
5. Click on
   
   More actions (on the right from Saved Passwords);
6. Select Import;
7. Choose the .csv file with your passwords;
8. Click Open.

It wasn't even necessary to restart the browser, it was possible to log into the respective sites immediately. How's that for efficiency? I also disabled the internal adblocker and anti-tracking facilities and installed uBlock Origin instead which is far more effective.

All of my favourite extensions have Chrome versions so that was great - as was the fact that I didn't need to spend time working around configuration bugs that haven't been corrected despite them being highlighted for years as problems - which was the case with Firefox involving the most of simplest of issues.

Thanks again.

 

[eyoungren]

@eyoungren - thanks so much for this recommendation. After Firefox locked up my MBP for the umpteenth time last night, I installed Vivaldi and made the switch and not only have my problems vanished but I've also witnessed a drastic increase in functionality. Previously I was dependent on using two browsers simultaneously but neither of them met my needs adequately. Vivaldi fulfils this role and more - within just one program.

I was able to import my bookmarks and browser history from Firefox quickly and easily. My passwords required a bit more work with the help of the freeware FF Password Exporter which created a .CSV file that Vivaldi could then import via the following steps:



It wasn't even necessary to restart the browser, it was possible to log into the respective sites immediately. How's that for efficiency? I also disabled the internal adblocker and anti-tracking facilities and installed uBlock Origin instead which is far more effective.

All of my favourite extensions have Chrome versions so that was great - as was the fact that I didn't need to spend time working around configuration bugs that haven't been corrected despite them being highlighted for years as problems - which was the case with Firefox involving the most of simplest of issues.

Thanks again.

👍

Cool! Glad it all worked out. Yeah, Vivaldi is awesome. I won't say it covered me 100 percent, but 99.99 is pretty good. What nailed it for me was that Vivaldi allows tabs on the bottom.

Edge is cool too, but I use that mainly for work or anything that gets tripped up by uMatrix.

Right now I'm having difficulty remembering which browser I came from before Vivaldi. Probably Chrome, but it's been quite a while.