Mac laptops forum: Buying a second hand macbook pro

This machine will support OSX 10.8 (Mountain Lion) which is the latest version but it will require more RAM to be comfortable with it.
this machine max's out at 4GB. Buy it from Crucial.com

Alternatively, you could run a lower version of OS X, perhaps 10.6 (Snow Leopard) which was a little less demanding. Still go with the max RAM though.

How you get to 10.8 or 10.6 depends on where you are now. Until we know that, we cannot be certain of the route you will take. Snow Leopard and Mountain Lion were both upgrades from Leopard/Lion and sold for $30 (ish).
In the case of SL, it was possible on most machines to go from 10.4 straight to 10.6 and then to 10.8.
Some people even went directly to 10.8 but that was a great leap of faith that did not always work.

As for FaceTime, 10.6.6 was the first software to support it.

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Yes, the MBP has a camera built-in that is just fine for FaceTime or Skype.
Updates install automatically via the Software Updater software that can be set to check for updates regularly.
Once an update is found, it will inform you and, after agreeing to the license, it will install itself.
Software Updates are machine specific and my advice is to download them whenever one is available.

RAM is very easy to install. Here in the US, I use Crucial.com for all my RAM requirements. I don't know of similar sites in the UK, I guess there must be one or two, as I left there before the Internet arrived.

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to Lion, OS X 10.7, you will lose the functionality of the Adobe and MS products.
Before Apple moved to the Intel processor, they used a PPC processor. Applications written for the PPC processor did not run on the Intel processor, and vice versa.
To offset the pain of the transition, Apple used a piece of software called Rosetta. This enabled the Intel processor to run applications that were written solely for the PPC processor.

Over time, software manufactures, including MS and Adobe, rewrote their software to run on both processors (Universal Binary) and then to just the Intel processor.
With Lion, Apple removed all support for applications that needed the PPC processor which meant that if you had any apps that ran solely on the PPC processor, they would not run!

To check whether what processor your apps need, find the application in the application folder and SINGLE click it. On the menubar (top of the screen) to File > Get Info.
In the resulting window, in the General section, next to Kind: it will tell you what processor it needs.
PPC, Universal Binary, UB or Intel.
Intel is good if you want to move up to the latest OS version, PPC is not.

What OS X version is currently installed. Apple menu, top left of screen, About this Mac. That will give that information

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glad it all worked out for you and your daughter.

You might as well go ahead with the RAM, it's cheap enough, and will be the icing on the cake.

Happy New Year


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