Owners of older Macs - anyone jump on to El Capitan? Also upgrade the HDD to SSD?
Tom_Reingold said:
ridski, what version were you running before the upgrade?
Whatever the last one was. Mavericks? I can't remember.
I recently upgraded my 2008 iMac from Leopard to Snow Leopard (yes, I'm slow), and I would like to now jump ahead to Yosemite (or maybe El Capitan if people think it's safe to go to the latest OS), but I'm concerned about compatibility with Office 2008, which is the most heavily used application on my machine (Entourage for email, Word, and Excel).
Has anyone successfully run Office 2008 on Yosemite? I've read bad reviews about Office 2016 for Mac, so would probably buy 2011 if 2008 won't work, or may upgrade anyway to go from Entourage to Outlook, assuming that it will read my old email correctly and import it into the new application. Thoughts?
My Mac. Mini was purchased Dec. mfr date 2014I,,, so. I'm sure there won't be any issues. I'm thinking of making the upgrade move...but I'm not in a big hurry. I have very little stuff on my Mac Mini- most of it is on a thumbdrive and some flash cards, NOT in the box. Indeed much of it has never been on this puter. Is it really necessary to back-up? Is partition best option? APPROX how long does this take?
BrickPig said:
To put a slightly finer point on it: When you click to upgrade to El Capitan, the installer will run a short diagnostic to check for any updates you may need prior to installation, and will a) tell you to install a particular update first, or b) install it automagically and then proceed with the El Capitan upgrade all by itself. The latter is FAR more likely than the former.
If b)) above how long will the whole process take?
Thanks.
I just upgraded my mid-2011 Mac Mini from something old (Tiger?) to El Capitan. I've been putting it off for a while, but I bought an iPhone SE and iTunes in the old OS couldn't see the phone, so I had no choice.
I'm pretty obsessive about backing up. I use CrashPlan plus a local Time Capsule. Just for fun, I copied a handful of really important files to a thumb drive before starting.
It took more than an hour to download the software package with my pokey Internet connection. I went to bed and let it run overnight, so don't know exactly how long it took.
The installation took an hour or so, mostly unattended. I was doing other things and not really paying attention. I didn't have to install any updates beforehand. It did prompt me to install some updates afterwards. The big one was Photo, which I guess is the replacement for iPhoto. It took forever to download. I still don't understand the relationship between Photo and iPhoto. iPhoto is telling me to upgrade my library, which may take an hour or more, but then do I migrate to Photo?. I haven't bothered to figure it out yet.
El Capitan seems much faster and I *love* the ability to text from my desktop. I had no technical issues at all with the install.
I'm using Office for Mac 2011. I opened a few Word and Excel files and did a few minor changes and saves, and everything seems okay. Microsoft is inviting me to "Get the New Office," but I think I'll wait a while.
Thanks kthny,
Sounds pretty much like a plug and pray affair NOT a career. I'll get to it soon...well maybe.
Yes, the upgrades are going very well lately. If you have little stuff on the computer that is important to you, you can do the upgrade without backing up. As a professional, I have to say, "You must back up before every upgrade," but my secret is that I don't do it with my machine, and it has always worked out.
Having said previously that I had no complications installing El Capitan on my wife's 2010 MacBook Pro, I should say that subsequently I did find a problem: After the upgrade her computer failed to continue Time Machine backups. Further, I could not use Disk Utility to verify and/or repair the backup drive, nor to erase it or partition it. (Curiously, I could manually move files to and from it, and open files that were housed on it.)
Eventually I plugged that drive into my 2011 MacBook Air and discovered that I could use Disk Utility from the 2011 machine.
I copied her backups to another drive, reformatted the backup drive, and copied the backups back to it. When I plugged it back into her computer, it asked if I wanted to use this drive for Time Machine, and if so did I want to import (my word, not the word the computer used) the old backups as part of the new backup. Clicked "yes" and "continue" through all the dialogs, and backups started again as normal.
All of which was rendered moot as, about a week later, a friend contacted me wanting to sell his 2011 MacBook Air and we bought it to replace her 2010 Pro.
Just relating the story here in case someone else encounters a similar problem with Time Machine.