Are you ready to dump your slow 6 year old Mac?
Eleanor Spenceley I just picked up on ebay a late-2009 (White Unibody) MacBook @2.26 GHz. 2Gb RAM, 5400rpm 250 GB Hard Drive. The external condition appears to be perfect and had been upgraded to run OS X 10.10 Yosemite... for an extremely reasonable £210...
Unfortunately, when I tried to boot this machine up, it took an absolute age at over 5 minutes. Logging in took a similar time and starting Safari ... well you could go a get a cup of tea before the app started up! Looks like I bought a right clunker on ebay... This machine was totally unusable!
However, if you see the RAM requirement for Yosemite, the machine needed 1.7 Gb just to run the operating system so the machine was already paging memory to a (these days) very slow spinning hard drive... So instead of putting the whole experience down to taking an expensive lesson not to buy another old clunker, I decided to invest another £110 in 8 Gb RAM upgrade as well as a 250 GB SSD. Once installed, the difference is like night and day. Booting takes 30secs, logging in 10 secs and starting Safari is almost instant!
This machine is now more than up to the task for most people... so much so, it's off to a very grateful member of the family who is happy to exchange £320 for such a (still) cheap and pretty fast MacBook!
Note: Yes I did say 8GB RAM in a late 2009 MacBook and not Apple's official 4GB. It appears many old Macs can take the extra RAM, just visit lowendmac.com to read up on your old Mac or get the App MacTracker from the App Store....
Note 2: This is not to be confused with the earlier white MacBook designs which I would stay away from since they can no longer run the latest OS...
Now... where's that next cheap old Mac on ebay begging to be in my collection... :-)