DCEmulation

They clearly advertised it with Facebook integration, but its no where to be found.

Basically what I need to know is this:

I've got a Core2 Duo MacBook Pro from 2008, with 2GB RAM.

When I upgraded to Lion, I appreciated the new features, but the upgrade introduced some noticeable lag in my system performance, particularly if iTunes and/or Safari is open.

Is Mountain Lion faster and more efficient (i.e. Snow Leopard: Leopard), or is it slower and more resource-intensive? Because it's worth the upgrade to me just to speed things up, if it will actually do so. But if it's going to make my machine feel more sluggish, I'd rather not.

I have no issues with speed with it. It did break compatibility with some older games.

In terms of graphics performance, Mountain Lion is amazingly faster. It actually allowed me to play games that I couldn't play before, most notably TF2.

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How about general system performance? With Lion, things start getting intermittently sluggish whenever I do something with iTunes open on another desktop, or if Safari has a page open that uses Flash. Neither was an issue under Leopard.

I haven't noticed any differences in the interface performance from Lion to Mountain Lion. But I never had any issues with Lion.

Mid-2009 MacBook Pro w/ 8GB RAM, Solid State Drive, GeForce 9400M.

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Your computer's about a year newer than mine, has an SSD, and has 4x the RAM of mine--so I'm not surprised there's a performance difference. I know I should probably upgrade my RAM, but I'm not entirely sure it's worth the cost for a 4-year-old machine.

I have a mid-2009 Mac Book Pro, and, man, the ram upgrade makes wonders.

Is it an Unibody or the model before?
Upgrading it should be 50 to 70$, and it should take 6 or 8GB max of ram, depending on the model. Check 'everymac' to make sure:

http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/m ... okpro.html

I also did an SSD upgrade which was very expensive then, but, right now, if you don't need loads of free space inside your laptop, you can get a 128GB for 100$ or so. You don't have to buy the fastests ones, as your laptop doesnt have SATA 6Gb/s, just SATA 3Gb/s or 1.5Gb/s. And don't buy OCZ, they have damn high return rates, better buy a Crucial, Samsung or Corsair:

http://www.behardware.com/articles/881- ... tes-7.html

But the RAM upgrade is always good on OS X.

Edit: Also, and I forgot, since Lion I feel like the memory management is worse than before...

Some things run better under Mountain Lion, some things run worse. The main thing that's worse is the web browser. Overall system performance is probably a wash compared to Lion, but the random beachballs while browsing can be quite annoying.

The computer itself is an early (well, mid) 2008 MBP, the very last pre-Unibody model. It replaced a launch-model MacBook Pro, which was only 2-3 years old at the time, but when they announced the Unibody models, I jumped on the last batch of the older kind because I didn't want to give up the removable battery. Unfortunately, the early 2008 MBP is probably the most problematic model in the series... at least I had AppleCare to deal with the problems as they arose

I had to replace the logic board last December (faulty GPU, failed just outside the recall window), and that was an out-of-pocket expense. The computer's old enough now that I'm hesitant to sink any further money into it, but I may at least spring for a RAM upgrade. I'm at least 18 months away from affording a new computer, I honestly have no idea what I'm going to replace this with (I want a laptop, I prefer Macs, but I hate the idea of a hardwired battery... and I'm worried that by the time I'm ready to buy, they'll have phased out the optical drive, too), and 2GB just isn't cutting it under Mountain Lion. I would just max it out, but there seems to be a significant price difference between 4GB (2x2) and 6GB (1x4, 1x2), mainly because the 4GB DDR2 module is proportionately more expensive. Maybe I'll just buy a 4GB module and keep one of the stock 1's in the other slot for 5. Remember when RAM had to be in matched sets?

Oooouch, paired EDO RAM, I remember that

My brother is also having lots of problems with that model: fans, noise, random hangs... But I think the RAM upgrade is not that expensive, will be probably less than 50 or 60 dollars, and is very noticeable.

But I have to say, probably my next laptop will be a Lenovo, with a real warranty I can be confident with. I'll totally switch to linux and leave the other laptop at home and for DJing.

I've noticed that browser hangs are usually related to:

Memory. Webpages today eat lots of it, with flash and AJAX and everything, and browsers cache a lot, you top your max, your computer swaps, and gets stuck for 2 to 10 seconds. And also, being the newer OS X versions, at least in my opinion, worst performers on this side... The memory upgrade may help.
Javascript. A lot of the webpages today are loaded on javascript, and the javascript engine for your browser can get stuck a bit. Try different browsers (chrome/firefox). Also, if you use firefox, go into your provacy settings, and reduce the days of history it stores and, on the address bar settings, reduce the number of places it search when writing something there.

Good luck!

Getting two 2GB modules (for a total of 4GB) would be about $40-50. But if I wanted to bump it to 5 or 6GB... the 4GB DDR2 modules are $70-$85 each.

Oooh, yeah, old modules keep going up in price...

It's 25€ for 2GB and 50€ dor 4GB. Buying RAM is a good investment for a 6-8 years time...

At this point, just do the 4GB. The 6GB might be nice depending on what you are doing, but considering you've survived this long on 2GB, the 6 isn't going to give you anywhere close to enough improvement for the price. Put that money in an SSD. In fact, the SSD would nearly be a better speed increase than the RAM. SSD's are crazy fast and remove the biggest bottleneck in a computer. Just put in a cheap 120GB one, throw the old hard drive in an external enclosure and keep all your big files on that. Your computer will speed up immensely. Not only that, but you can move the SSD to your new laptop whenever you get it to improve it's performance right out of the box (assuming they don't just come standard in Macs by then, I don't follow their hardware cycles).

Just take care of two things:

1.- The SATA controller on that machine is 1.5Gbps, so you cannot get the full speed from the hard disk. You'll feel the most the random access speed. Depending on what kind of work you do...

2.- Some new Apples (and other computers, specially some ultrabooks) cannot take that kind of hard disk because they are making them a) smaller b) soldered to the main board ¬_¬

That's what I'm thinking. This machine is already five years old; I really don't want to sink much more money into it. I just need it to get me by for another 12-18 months, until I can afford a replacement. But the memory issue has started getting pretty painful. Also, by getting two 2GB sticks, I'll be able to maintain whatever miniscule speed boost there is from a dual-channel setup.

A hard drive upgrade may actually be worth it, though I hadn't thought of that before. I don't know what my next computer is going to be, but I've been meaning to upgrade the PS3's hard drive for some time (60GB fills up quickly), and then I could stick this computer's old drive in the PS3.

I could also (I think; have to check bus speeds) use this computer's 1GB sticks to replace the 512MB sticks in my fiancé's old black MacBook, which will make it (barely) Lion/ML compatible. We've been planning to sell it, but haven't gotten around to it... and the upgrade should make it at least slightly more attractive.

It's funny how equipment upgrades always seem to cause chain reactions.

I really don't understand how you always manage to use such terrible hardware when cheap upgrades will provide a drastically enhanced experience.

I'm not advocating bleeding edge hardware or anything here... 2GB RAM on Mountain Lion, man, really?

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That's what the system came with, and I just never got around to upgrading it. I only upgraded it from Leopard last summer, and in case you missed my other comments during that time, I was on a shoestring for most of last year and up until just the last month or so. You want to know how I always end up lagging on hardware and trying to make do with things that are too old? My former employer screwed me out of most of my pay for last year (very illegal, but the company went bankrupt and the owners are overseas, making prosecution difficult and expensive), leaving me nothing to work with. Even the $50-$100 for a RAM upgrade would have brought my budget crashing down during that period.