W7 vs Lion on old MacMini=W7 is better.

Ben Cole · 4 Dec 2013 at 19:48

Wonder if anyone can help here.

I have an old Mac Mini, 2.0Ghz C2D but only GMA950 gfx and 2.5Gb RAM.

On W7 Netflix works fine and all my videos play well too. On Lion videos suffer tearing and jitteryness, Netflix struggles a bit and the general GUI seems choppy and jittery when asked to manipulate anything remotely detailed.

Now I realise this is old stuff but is there anything I can do to bring OSX Lion's performance up to Windows 7 levels? Long time PC tweaker but know little about Mac.

Thanks in advance.

Ben Cole · 4 Dec 2013 at 21:32

Yes, its W7 on the MacMini.

IE on Windows, Safari on Lion.

Even stuff outside a browser is poor though. For example minimising a video in QT player results in a very poor animation and as I said playing the video on QT results in tearing/shearing and less than impressive playback.

Ben Cole · 5 Dec 2013 at 04:59

I'm not sure it'll run on this but I'll check it out.

Ben Cole · 5 Dec 2013 at 22:40

Recommend rolling back to SL?

Ben Cole · 6 Dec 2013 at 13:14

bloodiedathame said:
Or obtaining ML, that's been pretty good for me on older machines.

As questioned above, is it supported on this machine though.

Ben Cole · 9 Dec 2013 at 12:10

The only thing putting me off that is that I've read they're not particularly easy to take apart.

I may have a look at trying some more RAM in there.

Ben Cole · 6 Jan 2014 at 10:29

Well I rolled back to Snow Leopard and it's like a new machine. Netflix is now watchable.

Also tried putting 4Gb RAM, don't think that'll make much/any difference for my usage pattern.

Seems like Lion is Apple's Vista so to speak!