Moving forward from 10.9.5

philbrown · Post by **philbrown** » Fri May 05, 2017 3:17 am

I'm a late adopter of about anything Mac-related. I land on an OS (or DP version) that works and I keep it until forced to upgrade. I was on 10.6.8 for years and now have been running 10.9.5. [I hate the naming conventions of Lion, Mavericks, Sierra etc. I can't keep all those in my head.] Anyway, the time has come to upgrade my 4,1 early 2009 MacPro. Some software I could really use is specifying 10.10 as a minimum. I'm hesitant to jusmp to the very latest system- my thinking is that will likely break a bunch of stuff that's working. Am I wrong about that? So I'm thining more like an incremental upgrade like 10.10 or 10.11. Maybe. FYI I'm running DP 8.07.

2 questions:

What would be the next stable system be that you would recommend (hopefully from experience) that will break the least amount of what I have going now. I'm 3/4 of the way through a big album project at the moment so that's a major concern.

Let's say it's 10.11 - How do I get hold of an older system when Apple seems to delete them from availability?

mikehalloran · Post by **mikehalloran** » Fri May 05, 2017 5:11 am

Without knowing what else you are running, no one can really answer that. Currently supported apps run in Sierra; some older ones won't. None run better in Mavericks, though.

As far as I'm concerned, Mavericks is almost as bad as Lion. Certain old apps that I use every day including Office 2008 run much better in El Cap and Sierra. I switched to Office 2011 for a few years because of the poor performance of 2008 in OS 10.7 – 10.10.

DP 9.13 over Sierra runs more efficiently than any earlier version. You will need to upgrade your 4.1 to run it, however—there are a few old threads on this. Otherwise, you are limited to 10.11 which is pretty good unless you are a Finale 2014.5 user. There is a hack that many use to run Sierra on a 4.1.

philbrown · Post by **philbrown** » Fri May 05, 2017 6:03 am

Thanks, Mike. I guess 10.11 would be my best bet then. I see where I can buy these older systems on ebay on a USB stick. I hope that's a valid way to go, because I'm not sure how else to get hold of them.

And yes, I had to look up El Cap, Sierra etc as I do every single time I come across those terms. All the version reference charts I've found on the net are way outdated.

MIDI Life Crisis · Post by **MIDI Life Crisis** » Fri May 05, 2017 8:31 am

mikehalloran wrote: 10.11 which is pretty good unless you are a Finale 2014.5 user.

Can you expand on that? What kind of issues exist there?

YouTube · Post by **James Steele** » Fri May 05, 2017 11:22 am

philbrown wrote:Anyway, the time has come to upgrade my 4,1 early 2009 MacPro.

Not quite on topic, but one of the very FIRST things you should do is turn it into a hexcore machine and nearly double its performance for roughly $150 or less.

philbrown · Post by **philbrown** » Fri May 05, 2017 11:36 am

James Steele wrote:
philbrown wrote:Anyway, the time has come to upgrade my 4,1 early 2009 MacPro.
Not quite on topic, but one of the very FIRST things you should do is turn it into a hexcore machine and nearly double its performance for roughly $150 or less.

I haven't worked up the nerve to risk that. I have so much editing work I do (I work a lot of 7 day weeks) if anything went wrong it would be a royal mess. The 4,1 is dicier than the 5,1 upgrade from what I understand. I'm holding out for the next gen macs at this point. Am I nuts?? Possibly.

bayswater · Post by **bayswater** » Fri May 05, 2017 4:00 pm

I agree that Mavericks was not a keeper. Yosemite worked well for me. El Cap turned my laptop into a doorstop. Sierra has been the closest to 10.6.8 in stability, a week or two between restarted versus several months on 10..6.8 and a day or two on Mavericks.

mikehalloran · Post by **mikehalloran** » Fri May 05, 2017 5:14 pm

MIDI Life Crisis wrote:
mikehalloran wrote: 10.11 which is pretty good unless you are a Finale 2014.5 user.
Can you expand on that? What kind of issues exist there?

Many complaints that seemed to go away with Sierra. I'm looking for the link.

MIDI Life Crisis · Post by **MIDI Life Crisis** » Fri May 05, 2017 6:20 pm

Not an issue for me now on my main machine, but my early 2003-8 core (3,1) may be stuck on Yosemite, if I have to pull it from store in an emergency. As noted elsewhere, that machine cannot update to Sierra. At least I know not to go to El cap! LOL

YouTube · Post by **James Steele** » Fri May 05, 2017 7:32 pm

philbrown wrote:
James Steele wrote:
philbrown wrote:Anyway, the time has come to upgrade my 4,1 early 2009 MacPro.
Not quite on topic, but one of the very FIRST things you should do is turn it into a hexcore machine and nearly double its performance for roughly $150 or less.
I haven't worked up the nerve to risk that. I have so much editing work I do (I work a lot of 7 day weeks) if anything went wrong it would be a royal mess. The 4,1 is dicier than the 5,1 upgrade from what I understand. I'm holding out for the next gen macs at this point. Am I nuts?? Possibly.

It's only dicier if you have a 8-core dual processor machine. Then the hexcore processors need to be de-lidded. I did the upgrade on my 4-core like yours in about 20 minutes and it almost doubled my Mac's Geekbench score.

HCMarkus · Post by **HCMarkus** » Fri May 05, 2017 9:07 pm

Phil, even if you don't want to upgrade the CPUs, do the 4,1>5,1 EFI update. That way you can run any OS the 5,1s support, including Sierra and who knows how many future OS iterations.

If you hit the horsepower wall, look into the CPU upgrade; use de-lidded CPUs in your dual CPU MP to minimize potential issues.

This thread at MacRumors is very helpful. A link to the 4,1>5,1 EFI Updater is found in the first post.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/ma ... st.1954766

YouTube · Post by **James Steele** » Sat May 06, 2017 1:27 am

HCMarkus wrote:If you hit the horsepower wall, look into the CPU upgrade; use de-lidded CPUs in your dual CPU MP to minimize potential issues.

Oops! My bad! I thought he had a single CPU.

philbrown · Post by **philbrown** » Sat May 06, 2017 2:36 am

Thanks, you guys. This board rocks! just look at James...

YouTube · Post by **James Steele** » Sat May 06, 2017 3:58 am

philbrown wrote:Thanks, you guys. This board rocks! just look at James...

Ha! Well my animated avatar was mostly a joke to annoy MLC!

MIDI Life Crisis · Post by **MIDI Life Crisis** » Sat May 06, 2017 12:14 pm

And I like it! No winner this time. Please try again.

Wait, you were intentionally trying to annoy me?

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