Upgrading a 2007 MacBook Pro to El Capitan - Getting More Life Out of an Ancient Mac

After throwing in a 256GB Solid State drive in my friend's 2010 MacBook Pro, it runs faster than when it was brand new.  Before installing the SSD drive earlier this year, her computer would take a long time to launch some programs and there was noticeable lag when running a few extra tabs in a Firefox.

Her Mac laptop, though 8 years old, now feels as zippy as something new.  Programs launch almost instantly and there's no noticeable lag when running different programs on the computer, including Lightroom and other things that require more resources than merely the Office suite.

I'm going to be upgrading my ancient 2007 MacBook Pro (model A1226). It's currently running 10.9.5 (Mavericks updated) and part of the research to do the upgrade is figuring out what OS will be best to put on an SSD and still get decent performance out of this laptop that would otherwise be far past it's usable life.

The latest OS that the 2.2 GHz Core 2 Duo laptop supports is

The Mid/Late 2007 MacBook Pro is the oldest laptop model supported by El Capitan OS 10.11.  To be running a 2007 model laptop and be able to run a 2015 version OS is pretty impressive.  Although it may be better to run Yosemite if the RAM needs and system usage is significantly less.

Mavericks has been running like molasses on this 11 year old laptop, but hard drives don't even usually last that long, so it's definitely showing it's age as the system performance slows to a crawl.  If more software could run, I would love to continue running Mavericks on this Mac, but not even my web browsers can be updated anymore!

El Capitan requires 2GB of RAM.
Yosemite requires 2GB of RAM.

Yosemite requires a MacBook Pro Mid-2007 or newer.

Chrome for Mac requires Yosemite (10.10) or later.  Since web browsing on the go is one of the only things I use this aging mac for, I would need to at least use Yosemite to make sure that my browser not only updates, but is safe from security holes. 

Installing El Capitan will help extend the laptop's usable life for as long as Chrome updates are supported!  If I was installing a standard (slower) platter hard drive, I would not install El Capitan because of it's negative impacts on performance [see the Youtube video notes below].

Rundown of OS Versions:

OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard - 28 August 2009
OS X 10.7 Lion (Barolo) - 20 July 2011
OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion (Zinfandel) - 25 July 2012
OS X 10.9 Mavericks (Cabernet) - 22 October 2013
OS X 10.10: Yosemite (Syrah) - 16 October 2014

OS X 10.11: El Capitan (Gala) - 30 September 2015
* MacBook Pro (Mid/Late 2007 or newer)

 macOS 10.12: Sierra (Fuji) - 20 September 2016
* requires a MacBook Pro (Mid 2010 or newer)

macOS 10.13: High Sierra (Lobo) - 25 September 2017
* requires a MacBook Pro (Mid 2010 or newer)

 macOS 10.14: Mojave (Liberty) - 24 September 2018
* requires a MacBook Pro (Mid 2012 or newer)

macOS 10.15: Catalina - October 2019
* requires: MacBook Pro (Mid 2012 or newer)

Mac mini (Late 2012 or newer)

Hardware (Models) Required for Special Features:

AirDrop requires: MacBook Pro (2012 or newer)
AirPlay requires: MacBook Pro (Early 2011 or newer)

OS X El Capitan review: Mac upgrade that's as solid as a rock [MacWorld]

Yosemite vs. El Capitan [YouTube Video] 3:47
* El Capitan took about 14 seconds longer to get to the Desktop from boot up than its predecessor Yosemite.
* El Cap took 5-6 seconds longer to open MS Word and get to a new document.
* iTunes opened slightly faster on El Capitan.
*
(This test is done on a 2009/2010 macbook white upgraded to 4GB of ram)The creator of this video recommends sticking with Yosemite if you have a Mac older than 2010.

Yosemite vs. El Capitan - Is it faster? [YouTube video] 5:10 (October 1, 2015)
On a newer Mac with a solid state hard drive, El Capitan only takes about one second longer to reach the desktop than Yosemite.  The Geekbench score did go up on a newer MacBook Pro by simply upgrading to El Capitan.

Full specs of the Mid/Late 2007 MacBook Pro [EveryMac]

How to Upgrade to OS X El Capitan [Apple]


My 120 GB hard drive would run even slower if I had less than 7GB of free hard drive space because of the page file that we regularly get tapped when the system memory was not enough to handle web browsing and other tasks simultaneously.

Somehow the system applications are taking up 46GB of space, and I'm not really sure how this is possible, because the Adobe suite is the only larger software I run on this aging beast.  My best guess is that the space is used up by buried Premiere cache files from when I first started video editing.