Upgrading Mac OS X

**Lordgeous** · 26-01-16, 16:29

1. No idea, sorry
2. I would unplug everything external. When i upgraded to E C I'd left an external backup drive of an older OSX connected by mistake. It whirred away the whole time E C was downloading/installing but thankfully nothing seemed to have changed!
3. Super Duper's never let me down - YET! But I do keep multiple backups, just in case.

I wonder if you'll hate the look of E C as much as I do? Why does Apple keep 'fixing' things that don't need to be fixed?! Same goes for the latest iOS. I always stick with an OS that's settled down and working fine. Was only forced to upgrade because of incompatabilities with music software!

**Dave2002** · 26-01-16, 16:51

Originally posted by Lordgeous View Post

1. No idea, sorry
2. I would unplug everything external. When i upgraded to E C I'd left an external backup drive of an older OSX connected by mistake. It whirred away the whole time E C was downloading/installing but thankfully nothing seemed to have changed!
3. Super Duper's never let me down - YET! But I do keep multiple backups, just in case.

I wonder if you'll hate the look of E C as much as I do? Why does Apple keep 'fixing' things that don't need to be fixed?! Same goes for the latest iOS. I always stick with an OS that's settled down and working fine. Was only forced to upgrade because of incompatabilities with music software!

I've already seen EC, and have it installed on another machine - though not one I use every day. I really can't quite see the point of some of the features. Split screen sounds like a possibly good idea, but like the split screen on the new iPad Pro, in practice it seems to be a real pain to set up or use - or maybe I just haven't figured out how to do it. Apple keep messing around with things they say will (might) help users, but often they're a waste of time.

Some things are worse than that. I hadn't realised until today just how forceful they have been about their wretched iCloud. Apparently there was no way to synchronise iPhones/iPads to Mavericks without using iCloud until a fairly late release. I'm assuming there is now. I did find a rant on a site about this from someone who said at great length that there are real privacy issues about having everything backed up or transferred via clouds, including iCloud. Others obviously thought this was mad, and that the cloud stuff is great and easy to use, but perhaps sadly I agree with the disgruntled gentleman. Forcing users to have to transfer data via external networks, or even doing it for them surreptitiously - which is what I have discovered has been happening with some of my data - is really poor. If I don't want to share my calendars, contacts, photos etc. with anyone else, why should I have to? OK - Apple will say that it's all secure - but it's not if it goes off one's own domain. That also assumes that Apple (or other cloud providers) are fully trustworthy, which I think is questionable.

Some people have to keep (at least some) data confidential, and are legally bound (within their own jurisdications or professional practice) to do so.

I wrote elsewhere that someone I've heard of does use cloud services, but always encrypts his own data first.

I think mrs d. managed to turn calendars on so she can see mine and vice versa, but I really did not want that. It shouldn't be possible to do that kind of thing without users being aware, and giving permission. I've probably turned that feature off, but it seems that if I turn everything off on my iPad I might (not sure, but might) lose some photos, and will lose the "Find my iPad" feature, which is only of concern if I take it out and there's a high chance of it being lost or stolen. In any case, I don't see why that feature couldn't be retained even if everything else is blocked.

I already mentioned one thing I didn't like about EC - the Activity Monitor thing - but maybe it's not so bad as mentioned in another thread, and anyway I suppose I can live with that if it's as bad as I fear. I don't particularly want to have a whole lot of features which enable interaction with iPads, unless they are completely under my control and secure and I know what's going on.

**Lordgeous** · 26-01-16, 23:33

Agree totally. I've kept my head out of the clouds, so far!

Now tonight, more problems with Logic, making it unuseable. Everything was stable for years til I was forced to upgrade the OS. Bloody 'puters!

**Dave2002** · 27-01-16, 13:11

Originally posted by Lordgeous View Post

Agree totally. I've kept my head out of the clouds, so far!

Now tonight, more problems with Logic, making it unuseable. Everything was stable for years til I was forced to upgrade the OS. Bloody 'puters!

Is that this Logic music program? - http://www.apple.com/uk/logic-pro/

Am plodding on with EL Capitan. Currently there is an installer program in Applications, which arrived after several hours. I'm going to see if I can copy it to another drive, or if it backs up, or if it will go on a USB stick. I think last time I did this (on another machine) I must have pressed Continue at this point - and the installer runs and deletes itself on completion of the install process.

I have also put the Time Machine disk back in, to see if that will pick up the El Capitan installer program before I hit the Continue button.

Apart from the very slow download time - possibly due to a combination of a slow ADSL line and other factors - the machine now seems to have slowed down quite a lot. I have considered rebooting it to see if that would speed things up. There are significant problems with lack of appropriate disk space etc. - basically I think the installer doesn't run well in memory if there isn't enough, so ends up using Swap space - which will be orders of magnitudes slower. There isn't much I can do about this now, unless I order more memory, do a hardware upgrade and defer the install process, so I'll probably live with a very slow process once I've checked that it might work, and hope that once installed the El Capitan system will be fast enough for most purposes. i will be happy enough to do a memory upgrade once I've got this done - but others have clearly had problems with the system apparently hanging for hours, or even days.

Others might want to consider doing a memory upgrade before embarking on this or similar upgrades. 8 Gbytes should work and be affordable, though I'd consider a 16 Gbyte upgrade if it could be done moderately cheaply. My guess is that an upgrade to 8 Gbytes would definitely be cost effective, while a 16 Gbyte upgrade might not confer such a great incremental benefit, taking cost into account.

**Anastasius** · 27-01-16, 22:31

How much spare disk space have you got? Best practice is to keep at least 10% of the total disk as spare.

The El C installation package takes just under 6GB of storage

If you only have 4GB of RAM then no wonder you are struggling.

I re-installed Mavericks to day. Painless.

**Dave2002** · 28-01-16, 09:31

Originally posted by Anastasius View Post

How much spare disk space have you got? Best practice is to keep at least 10% of the total disk as spare.

The El C installation package takes just under 6GB of storage

If you only have 4GB of RAM then no wonder you are struggling.

I re-installed Mavericks to day. Painless.

Actually I did manage to capture the installer - or at least I think I did. It's 6.2 Gbytes, and should fit on an 8 Gbyte USB stick, though I put it on a 16 Gbyte one.

Surely El Capitan should work with machines with "only" 4 Gbytes of RAM. If not, then Apple should recommend upgrades before install, and have an installer which checks and aborts unless there's enough main memory to make it work. Of course having limited mamory may make the install process take longer, but it shouldn't be impossible.

I wasn't going to comment on where I am at present - though I may be veering towards the group of those who have been "disappointed" with the whole "upgrade" process. I have done one installation successfully, though that took a while. This one is not going well so far.

One of my friends has done several (more than 2) installs of Windows 10 on PCs and laptops which he owns, and says that some work fine, and some, on apparently very similar machines, were either very difficult or even impossible - and for no apparent reasons. Maybe the same applies to some Apple installs.

**Anastasius** · 28-01-16, 17:47

The system requirements to run El C are 2GB but to be honest I think you are making a big 'ask' trying to instal using 4GB. It will instal - eventually - as you have found but to do so there will be an awful lot of page in/page outs and that is, I suspect, what is slowing down your instal. So strictly speaking there is no need for Apple to recommend a memory upgrade because El C will get there eventually. I know it's all relative but at about £36-40 for some more memory from Crucial is I would have thought a no-brainer.

**Dave2002** · 28-01-16, 20:28

Originally posted by Anastasius View Post

The system requirements to run El C are 2GB but to be honest I think you are making a big 'ask' trying to instal using 4GB. It will instal - eventually - as you have found but to do so there will be an awful lot of page in/page outs and that is, I suspect, what is slowing down your instal. So strictly speaking there is no need for Apple to recommend a memory upgrade because El C will get there eventually. I know it's all relative but at about £36-40 for some more memory from Crucial is I would have thought a no-brainer.

You may be right about the memory for doing the install, and indeed I would consider going up to the max 16 GByte if I could do it cheaply enough. It looks as though all the iMac models from mid to late 2009 will take up to 16 GByte - some of the very latest ones may go even higher.

Although I've disliked Microsoft and Windows for a very long while, at least they did offer tools to check compatibility for upgrades. If Apple had followed this practice, even if there was an "advisory" on memory capacity and upgrades, that would have been very helpful, and probably better than what they have done.

Despite this, I feel it should be possible to upgrade the particular iMac even with the 4 GByte memory which is available.

I may abandon my attempts to do an "in situ" install, and go for a clean install, which I think will wipe the drive without trying to preserve the current contents. If I do that, I'll want to be absolutely sure that I have all the essential files safely stored on at least one drive, preferably 2 or more.

I did try to boot from a SD! bootable backup today to my MBP - but that seemed to fail. I think for that to work there needs to be a lot more spare space on the MBP, and mine is in any case only 256 Gbytes until I decide to replace the SSD. I've never booted from an SD! Backup, so I don't know if it should work. I did try CCC and that did work on another machine.

Re Apple's own Time Machine, it seems odd to me that Apple don't make drives with TM backups on bootable, or so it would seem from my searches. As such TM would seem to have major limitations, though it may have other useful properties. I'll come back to this on the thread about backups.

My previous El C install was to a machine with 8 Gbytes of memory, and an almost empty 1 GByte Fusion drive. It still took a while. Apple could give users much better clues as to what processes the install procedure goes through during operating system upgrades, and that might reduce the (largish) number of people who have clearly struggled to get various OS upgrades to work.

I probably wouldn't even have bothered to start this if Adobe had advertised Photoshop Elements 14 and Premiere Elements 14 as compatible with earlier OS versions. Possibly they may work with Mountain Lion, but the documentation definitely suggests that Mavericks or Yosemite are required - and I think it is accepted that El Capitan which was developed later should also support those programs.

PS: Looks as though a 16 GByte upgrade from Crucial might be not much more than £60, so good if it'll work.

**Anastasius** · 29-01-16, 06:52

I think you're being a bit harsh on Apple. EC will install in 4GB ...just takes a bit longer. How much handholding do you need?

Booting from SuperDuper works fine. I have no idea why you are unable to. What drive were you booting from? Has it booted before? Did you check you could restore and boot up from it the first time you made a backup copy? What is the interface ? Space on the MBP is irrelevant if you are booting up from an external drive.

When you instal 'in situ' you do close all other applications? Run Permissions on Disk Utilities ? All good housekeeping. I'm sure you do.

**Dave2002** · 30-01-16, 00:38

Originally posted by Anastasius View Post

I think you're being a bit harsh on Apple. EC will install in 4GB ...just takes a bit longer. How much handholding do you need?

Booting from SuperDuper works fine. I have no idea why you are unable to. What drive were you booting from? Has it booted before? Did you check you could restore and boot up from it the first time you made a backup copy? What is the interface ? Space on the MBP is irrelevant if you are booting up from an external drive.

When you instal 'in situ' you do close all other applications? Run Permissions on Disk Utilities ? All good housekeeping. I'm sure you do.

I thought you were the one who tried to suggest that 4Gbytes was insufficient, and going to cause problems.

Out of devilment I checked to see if the Adobe packages will actually run in Mountain Lion.
They won't!

Ergo I had no choice but to carry on with a possible install of EC.

I checked the SD! would boot up - which it did, though very slowly.
Finally I decided that it was worth another shot, and I found the El Capitan Installer in Applications and ran it. I'd already taken a copy. It gave slightly misleading time estimates, but that's moderately "normal" with computers in my experience. I think it took around or under an hour to install, though the download was the one I had days ago - which did take a while.

Adobe Premiere does install in El Capitan, and it runs - though I've not used it "for real" yet.

There is still some tidying up to do, such as deleting a whole bunch of files I don't really need except perhaps on a backup disk.

I'll get back to you about things I do or do not like in El C later on.

**Anastasius** · 31-01-16, 16:24

I'm pleased you've got El C working...I'd be interested to hear your thoughts. Some people think there is a speed improvement for certain actions.

**Dave2002** · 02-02-16, 10:13

Originally posted by Anastasius View Post

I'm pleased you've got El C working...I'd be interested to hear your thoughts. Some people think there is a speed improvement for certain actions.

It's quite complicated at present, as the main reason for doing the move to EC at this time was to install Adobe packages, and to do some video editing. These tasks are themselves challenging, so some of the problems very likely come from the difficulty of those tasks.

I can comment now, to some extent on non video related tasks.

The split screen working is quite good, when it works! Sod's Law dictates that things will go wrong as soon as one starts to write about them, and indeed that's what happened when I started this reply. I haven't fully mastered split screen working yet though. I've only just figured out the split screen working on my iPad Pro under iOS9, which once a few pennies drop is really rather good. The Mac OS X implementation is similar, but its behaviour is not completely the same.

In the Mac OS X version of split screen, getting one application (primary?) into the split screen format is easy, but selecting the second one still seems tricky to me. If there is only one active screen at the start of the operation, it doesn't seem possible to get another one going. The application window positions itself at the left, and the message No Available Windows appears on the right. This seems a fairly useless "feature" - there ought surely to be a way of selecting another to occupy the right hand side of the screen. Also, several operations on windows may be necessary to get the windows into locations which are actually going to help - and this may well be application dependent. It would sometimes be good to lock the open window just to the left hand sides, to get a better format and appearance. It isn't always essential for windows to expand across the full width of the display. To some extent this problem can be avoided by only staying within the application window, and working from there, though why it has to be on the left I'm not sure. Also, if there is only one window, it might make sense to have the possibility of fixing it as a fixed width screen in the middle of the display.

It looks as though at least two applications have to be running for split screen to work. So far it seems easiest to only have two, to make sure that the correct ones display. Some applications don't seem to behave particularly well in split screen mode (Mail?) but it is possible to have two browsers, say Firefox and Chrome side by side. If one is then removed the other resizes wildly - which is disconcerting. Split screen looks as though it could be useful, but is perhaps still not well enough thought out, and a bit tricky to use.

Once the applications are set up, then working within them is quite simple, and they can also be interchanged Left <->Right.

I commented already about the Activity Monitor - and I still don't like it. I take your point about the Memory Pressure feature. The much earlier Activity Monitor had the option to have a visual representation of the memory state on the icon, in the dock. This feature seems missing in the new one. Having a whole window open just for that basic feature of Activity Monitor is incredibly wasteful of screen space, though obviously if a more detailed report is needed then the space could be more effective.

There is a free downloadable app called Memory Monitor, which seems to do what is really needed most of the time, and I'd recommend that until anything better comes along. This tool shows the free space, and also issues notifications if there are any impending memory issues.

Re speed, during the first day or two I felt that overall the speed of general operations was far worse than previously, so I looked to see if others felt the same. Many had experienced that. However, some commented that it might improve after a day or two, perhaps due to various indexing operations having taken place in the background, and my impression is that that is indeed the case. I'm still not sure that everything is as fast as it should be, though, but most operations are now acceptable.

At first I thought that the speed problems could be due to slow internet, but a trip to check out speed check showed that the internet connection is quite good - over 14 mbps, so that shouldn't have been the reason.

Some people seem to think that slow operations could be due to bugs, perhaps in Mail, for example.

I have now had one major crash - which forced me to power the machine off. It is clear that the machine now needs more memory - but as mentioned that could be because I'm now trying to do more demanding things, such as video editing. If things carry on more or less OK, then I shall order more memory - probably even upgrade to 16 Gbytes.

The silly business of the Time Machine drive icon not showing still persists. Sometimes that can be fixed by stopping and relaunching the Finder, but it's not totally reliable so far.

The business of video editing is still a pain, though I now have Adobe Premiere Elements working. I managed to split one video using a downloaded app Movie Clip Free, which has resulted in an mp4 file. Seems OK, except that Premiere doesn't want to import it. That however, is arguably not an El Capitan issue. I thought that Premiere was supposed to be able to cope with many video formats!

**Anastasius** · 02-02-16, 21:05

Three words

Buy More Memory

Thanks for the Memory Monitor tip although I use Activity Monitor and have the window set up so I just see about 1/4" of the memory bar peeking out from behind other windows.

Upgrading Mac OS X

Upgrading Mac OS X

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