Which O/S upgrade is preferable for an upgrade Mac Mini solo

[Abdulhaq]

I have upgraded my Mac Mini solo with a core2due T7200 2.0 ghz processor. The performance improvement is remarkable. I am still using the Tiger Operating system. I have 2 Gb Ram installed. I believe the next logical step is to upgrade the operating system. I can upgrade to either Snow Leopard or to the Lion (not Mountain Lion) operating system. Kindly guide me as to what would be the preferred operating system to upgrade to.

Regards,

Abdul Shaikh

 

[Omnius]

Honestly, I think you'll get better performance out of snow leopard with that setup. I used to run a 2007 mini and when I was briefly at those stats, I found lion used up a bit more ram than snow leopard.

 

[Isamilis]

I have iMac 2010 (4GB / i5) and evaluate Lion for 2-3 months before going back to Snow Leopard due to performance and memory usage. So, yes, go with SL.

 

[blanka]

SL,
Best OSX ever.
Also available for sale on disk at Apple for 20$/18€
You can also consider buying the server version, it allows virtualisation on other/modern machines too.

 

[FreakinEurekan]

You have to install SL first regardless, even if you want to go to Lion, so I'd suggest installing SL and trying it out. I did a similar CPU upgrade on an early 2006 iMac recently and I went on to Lion, mainly to keep the UI consistent with my ML machines & to use iCloud to keep bookmarks, etc in sync. Either will run well with 4GB RAM, but if you're staying with 2GB you'll see better performance with SL.