More RAM means more space for your OS and applications to work in and less time being 'swapped' to the hard disk. Officially, your Mac can to go to 8GB of RAM. If memory utilization is close to or at the top of its limit, chances are you are sending the overflow memory requests to the hard disk (swap). Open up Activity Monitor and leave it open as you go about your day. I'm suspecting you are seeing some performance slowdown if you are running out of memory. Here's my suggestion (and I have personally done this for a friend and they couldn't be happier) based on the fact you have a pretty good machine in your possession.įirst, upgrade your RAM. Upgrading to one that is pushing 4 years old now may not be the wisest move - especially if what you are doing centers around the web where the tech changes almost on a daily basis. It seems that you are running into compatibility issues because your OS is now too old. If squeezing out every nanosecond of response is key to what you are doing, then this is entirely a moot thread you should buy a new machine.
Your CPU and GPU are not going to change so running comparative benchmarks against them with varying OS's tells you little. You have to ask yourself the question 'is the performance increase/decrease worth the added functionality?'īetter yet, 'Am I going to notice the difference?' You have to weigh the balance between increased functionality/usability/security of the new OS with the performance of the old.
