Mac OS X forum: Upgrade to Lion or stick to Snow Leopard?

It's cheap enough

Jimmy is correct on the graphic card but I don't know why he mentioned it.

P

The OP said "should I upgrade those too?" Now, maybe I misread things, it was early and I got a bit less sleep than usual, but I was taking that to mean the OP was asking about upgrading the RAM and graphics card.

I will say upgrading RAM is never, well almost never, a bad idea... But it's really rather amazing what OS X can do with just 2GB of RAM. My workstation/server (original model Mac Pro) at work only has 2GB of RAM, still seems faster than my 2010 i7 iMac with 12GB of RAM at times.

So to the OP I'd say upgrading RAM, regardless of the OS, wouldn't be a bad idea... HOWEVER, if 2GB is doing it for you presently, and money is a bit tight, then don't worry about it. If you can swing the cost of an extra 2-4GB of RAM, then by all means go for it. But maybe wait until after you've recovered financially from any holiday shopping you've done/will do. There will never be a shortage of deals on these things, holiday shopping season or no. It's probably about that time again when the RAM manufacturer's get busted for price fixing and the price on RAM drops like a stone anyway. Happens almost like clockwork every couple of years.

I wasn't talking about the graphics card. I know you can't upgrade that. I just simply mentioned my graphic projects to clarify if 2 GB of RAM is enough for it.

I stand corrected then. Still might not be a total waste though, since someone else may come along some day and see that.

I think I covered the RAM angle fairly well in my other post to this thread, so guess there's really nothing left to discuss.

I have Lion on my iMac and Snow Leopard on my MacBook Pro and I totally prefer Lion to Snow Leopard. It's a major upgrade in my opinion. Is it necessary? Too subjective a question for me to answer. But in my case, it was definitely worth it.

BIG caveat - if you decide to upgrade, make sure you don't have apps that require Rosetta, (like Microsoft Office 2004) because they won't work after upgrading.

But using an iMac -- and definitely get the Magic Trackpad -- with Lion is a pleasure.

how do you know if a program needs Rosetta?

usually in the Applications folder.
Right Click (Control + Click) and Get Info
If the kind says Application (Intel or Universal Binary), then you do not need Rosetta
If the kind says Application (PPC), then you do need Rosetta

P

The easiest a fastest way is to open the Apple System Profiler (Apple menu, About This Mac) select Sofware/Applications and a list of your applications will be generated. One of the columns in the list is for "Kind." If you click on the column's heading it will sort by kind and the Power PC apps will be identified.