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rplus7

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 7, 2016
1
0
So I got an old macbook2,1 released on 2007 thanks to a friend. 3GB Ram, running a new install of OS X Lion. Before telling me "well duh, of course it's slow, it's old", any other older macs I recently tried from that era don't run that bad today (mainly an 17" 2006 iMac and one of the first intel Macbook Pros). I deduced that this was caused by the graphics card (an intel GMA 950). Main problems are overall sluggishness and choppy scrolling. What surprised me is that after installing windows on a bootcamp partition, I got a much better performance on Windows than on OS X. Even an indie game with old ass retro graphics like Undertale runs painfully slow in its OS X version in this machine, while it runs fine on windows (just check some screens, it SHOULD just run fine even on a **** graphics card like this). It seems that Apple has capped the VRAM to 64mb and it shows since it's barely usable on OS X even for web browsing, while it's a perfectly usable machine in Win 7. Shame on Apple to let its machines to have a better perfomance on rival OSes.

I tried googling and all I found was some utility called GMAbooster that it's being unavailable to download for some time in its OS X iteration. Is there anything that can be done with this machine to make it somewhat usable? I wanted to give it to my mother but I won't do it if it runs like this.
 

Samuelsan2001

macrumors 604
Oct 24, 2013
7,729
2,153
Well have you tried troubleshooting the disk drive?? Repair permissions etc or even a complete wipe and OSX reinstall, you'll need to create a bootable USB for Lion (lion is pretty poor if it will take mountain lion upgrade to that) but there are endless online guides and free software for this.

You might run the apple hardware test as well the HDD might be dying if its the original.

Installing an SSd will almost certainly make it a usable if limited machine.

Lastly it's an 8-9 year old small laptop it's amazing it runs at all.
 
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