Upgrading 2008 MBP to Mavericks - should I do it?

I've been using my trusty 2008 MBP and I can upgrade it to Mavericks for free. The question is should I? Is the hardware good enough to run Mavericks? I found an article at Ars Technica that indicated 24-30 percent improved battery life, even on old hardware so I decided to give it a shot. There are several articles around on how to do the upgrade from various operating systems and the article that I looked at was quite detailed.

I decided to install Mavericks on an external firewire drive (always nice to have a few spare external drives hanging around) to test it. I have Snow Leopard (some systems have Tiger or Leopard and have to upgrade to at least Snow Leopard to install). I've never used the Mac App Store before so I tried that out and downloaded the App (it took a while and I just let it run overnight). I installed it this morning and it just finished. It informed me that three applications that I had installed were not supported by this version of Mac OS X (I don't really need them).

I also played around with migrating my user data over but it informed me that it couldn't move it over because it was on another target disk (I have a two-disk setup). I will have to figure that out later. I have to use my laptop for work so I can't really afford to play around with Mavericks during the day - but I'll play around with it during the evening and work towards getting it set up with my user data.

Wednesday, October 23, 2013 7:46 AM

I have it up and running and logged in and started up GMail on Safari. It asked me if I wanted to setup a bunch of Apps for Google Services. I said yes and it's busy grabbing stuff from Google using background agents.

One thing that I noticed is that the fan is running on moderate right now. Normally my fan doesn't come on in Snow Leopard unless something heavy is running. CPU usage is currently running at 75%. I'm assuming that the system is doing a lot of background setup stuff and I guess it may take some time for it to settle down. It appears that Mail is going to download my entire GMail information and Google Calendar information. That could take a whole day as I have almost 10 GB of stuff in GMail.

Mavericks definitely uses more RAM. My system normally runs with 2.2 GB with all of my work stuff loaded. It's running at 3.33 GB right now just doing the GMail stuff in the background. I'm not even running Safari at the moment. I have a feeling that I would want to upgrade to 6 GB of RAM on this system if I want to stick with Safari.

I really like Safari from what I've seen of it so far. There are a lot of nice touches to the OS in that it does things for you automatically. It feels like a thoughtful operating system.

I need to get it to a steady state to evaluate whether or not I should do the installation permanently or just stick with Snow Leopard. I am also evaluating the new RMBPs as well and may just go with a new model. I also have a 2007 15 inch MBP (daughter's) with only 2 GB of RAM and a 2008 15 inch MBP (son's old laptop and it's currently our spare), also with 2 GB of RAM. They would both definitely have to be upgraded to at least 4 GB of RAM to be worthwhile.

October 23, 2013 8:00 AM

System has settled down and is now running quieter but not as quiet as Snow Leopard (fan noise). I'm probably going to leave it running for several hours doing nothing to see if it can finish all of the startup and setup stuff and get to a stable point. CPU usage is still fluctuating at a level that I consider too high right now.

My feeling is that I would get into swap space if I loaded up a few of my usual programs and my system would take a performance hit unless my swap space were on the SSD. My SSD is pretty small so I don't think that I'd have the space for it unless I got a bigger SSD. I imagine swap performance isn't a problem on the newer MacBooks with SSDs.

October 23, 2013 9:09 AM

As a sanity check I rebooted to my Snow Leopard and everything is working fine.

 

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Lots of good information here:

How to install Mavericks over Leopard | Macworld

 

Use the Edit button, Luke...

 

Keep me updated mmoy. I'm also hesitant to upgrade on my 2008 MBP (but 15" model).

 

From everything I have read, even older 2008 era MacBooks seems to be getting benefits. Mainly 10.9 is faster, it uses the CPU more efficiently, Safari plug-in blocking is nice (though you could have done that in FireFox or Chrome with the right plug-in/setting), and it handles RAM much better. As of now, every system compatible with it is receiving some level of benefits.

 

I upgraded as soon as it became available on my 2012 13" rMBP. Everything is more responsive. Scrolling long and complex web pages (try theverge.com) used to stutter quite a bit, now after the initial scroll it's very smooth, much smoother than before. I imagine it will benefit even older models. Now I'm a little less inclined to upgrade to the 2013 Haswell model.

The javascript engine on OSX/Safari has always been impressively fast even on Mountain Lion. It is even faster now. I have two Denon receivers here with browser controller. Everything happens instantly now on Mavericks. Even on ML it was way faster than my Windows box (3770K at 4.5GHz), every button click took a second to respond when controller the receiver.

 

I had partitioned my hard drive, like I do I windows with a main and data partition, and I lost everything because the update corrupted the FAT partition. I had done that so I could save the maverick os install file but then I had to take the other mac to get it installed at the Apple store.

I actually feel more stuttering especially in Launchpad. Some issues were fixed by restarting the computer after everything is installed. Also, the activity monitor only shows read / write to disk NOT the whole disk size and the amount used. That was very useful.

Some good things:

The shutdown seems little bit more snappier. I regretted this when I upgraded from SL to Lion / ML as windows was beating Mac by a mile on shutdown times.
I did an upgrade and I actually gained space. How Window 7'ish of Mac (things are together well kept). I assumed that since 2007 Macs were compatible and it was a free upgrade, so Apple must have cleared out the kinks to just do an upgrade. If you had done upgrades before, you would definitely do a clean install on Lion or Mountain Lion because junk used to get carry over from the previous OS.

My password on mail got screwed over in yahoo, but for some reason Mail has given me grief in the past with timing out etc unlike thunderbird. I guess that you can't have it all

 

I've decided to get a new machine instead of upgrading my old system to Mavericks. There are several applications that I need to run on this machine infrequently and I'd rather not take the chance that I break them in doing an upgrade. There is a Windows partition on this machine that I need as well. I know that I could do a lot more testing to see if I could get Mavericks to work but it's a lot easier to just get a new machine and keep the old one around for those applications.

 

I bought the rMBP but it's a family machine - though it's wonderful. I'm still using my 2008 17 MBP and just ran several test Mavericks upgrades and I'm quite pleased with the performance with only 4 GB of RAM on a HDD. I'm planning on upgrading the Snow Leopard partition on the SSD to Mavericks after backing it up and will be fully on Mavericks in a day or two. I'm quite impressed by all of the improvements to Mission Control and Spaces and a number of minor bugfixes that make the experience smoother. I don't like to throw out old hardware, even when I have something newer so I will keep using this thing for a while. It does have the "dark bands" screen problem but I'm getting around that by using 24 inch external displays. I can still use the display when mobile in a pinch.

 

I would clone your current system to an external drive using CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper and then go ahead and upgrade to Mavericks. That way you can always boot form the external if your system isn't working well and restore.