Forum - Banjo Ben Clark

Electronic tech questions

#19

I still use my MacBook Pro 2011 on a daily basis and it’s going strong. 2 things you can do to speed it up.

First, the simplest thing to do is see what programs are starting up in the background that don’t need to and address that. You can review how to do that here.

Second, and this is where the real bang for your buck will come in, you can swap out your hard drive for a solid state drive. Oddly enough, those 2011 MacBook Pros come with a SATA3 controller on the motherboard, but only come with a SATA2 drive.

So, upgrading to a SSD not only gives you the improved performance of solid state, it also doubles the data transfer rate between the drive and the board.

When I upgraded mine, waking up my Mac from sleep went from 1 minute 26 seconds to 10 seconds. Everything got so much faster I no longer even thought about a new laptop.

Also, if you want to keep it for a while, you can upgrade the standard 4 GB of RAM to 16 GB.

I would imagine you could do all of that for < $150, depending on the size of the SSD you get and whether or not you choose to do it yourself.

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#20

That all sounds fine, even though my MB still runs great, and it’s plenty fast for me…

But does it solve the issue of only being able to run the outdated software that is no longer supported such as Skype? That is why I’m looking at tablets…

#21

I have purposefully not updated my OS in a few years because some of the software I need for my job doesn’t run on the newer versions. Have you tried updating your OS to the latest? If it’ll update, that should solve that problem.

#22

I am as current as I can be on the OS 10.6.8 is as new as it will go

#23

Ok. I don’t have any experience running Skype on tablets, which is why I keep talking about your laptop.

One last possibility if you’d rather keep a single device. You can install Parallels or a similar package and then run some flavor of Windows in dual boot mode.

#24

For what it’s worth, I found several links saying that a 2011 MacBook Pro is upgradable way past 10.6.8. Here’s a link saying High Sierra will even work on 2009 devices.

I did find one discussion that suggested you may need to upgrade your RAM to get a newer OS. Not sure if that’s true, but a RAM upgrade would be so cheap these days, I’d probably do it anyway.

#25

I’ve heard that high sierra on old computers slows them down to try to make you get a new one. Just my two cents

#26

Let me know if you are still having issues here please, your Mac should be able to run the Skype consumer product without issues.

#27

I’ve tried several types of workarounds and reloads & such and and it’s still non-functional.

#28

Did you ever upgrade the OS to at least 10.9?
https://support.skype.com/en/faq/fa10328/what-are-the-system-requirements-for-skype

#29

It wont go beyond OS 10.6.8 as far as I’ve been told through trying to upgrade it and from two computer shops.

#30

What phone do you use? If you have a modern cell phone they typically can run Skype fine as well to just share and facetime/Skype.

#31

Is facetime not an option? I think it works tons better than Skype. I upgraded my wifi to google wifi and saw about 10x jump in speed. Some parts of my house had less than ideal wifi connection. With google wifi, you can purchase add on access points that link to the one that is wired. Now I have amazing signal throughout my house. You might try wired vs wireless. If wired into you Internet router is not satisfactory, wifi never will be. However, if wired is great and wireless is not, I would look into getting the Google wifi access points.

#32

If you are close enough to an Apple store, you can always take the laptop there as well and advise them what you are trying to do. I re-read to see if you can store the meetings/videos offline so that might not be an option for the mobile device, but then again depending on what type of meeting you are doing it might.

#33

Hey Dave,

Hate to say it, but your internet speed is not that great. eg. I have DSL which is definitely slower than providers such as Comcast or Spectrum, and I’m downloading at 93 Mb.

By satellite, do you mean someone like DirectTV is your provider? Satellite internet is not that good, and I believe they throttle your connection after you’ve used so much bandwidth.

Are you in an area where satellite is your only option? I believe internet connection speed will be a huge determinant as to how well Skype will work for you.

I’d start with going cable or DSL, if it’s doable and in your area. This could be bit of an ordeal with so many variables. Best to you on this.

Jack

#34

Dave,

Your internet provider can tell you exactly what you have, and they can tell you how much download and upload speed you should be getting.

Jack

#35

I stream things fine. it’s a computer/software age/compatibility problem, not a “capacity” problem or wifi problem.

#36

Based on the skype Support at https://support. skype .com/en/faq… If you use it for 15 minute, for CALL, you are taking about 15 MB and for Video you are taking up 30 MB of bandwidth . So, for 1 minute CALL only, you will take 0.3 to 0.8 MB of bandwidth .

#37

It is not just bandwidth that matters, but latency also. If the link has high latency, the video will be choppy. Other programs running at the same time as well as other people using the Internet at the same time can cause issues with decreased bandwidth and increased latency. There is no QOS -Quality of Service on the Internet, so your voice and video data is competing with everyone else’s file downloads.

#38

Well, excuse me!