24" iMac Early 2009 - can I usefully upgrade

[BillN_33]

Just dragged out my old iMac - been in the cupboard for some time since I bought a 27" 5K machine, which is a 2014 Machine

spec is 2.66 GHZ Core 2 - 8GB 1067 DDR3 - 635GB of storage

can I usefully upgrade it? - would it be cost effective - obviously screen resolution is nowhere near as good as the 5K, but it's OK

is it worth adding a MacMini and just use the machine?

I have a few windows apps which I run using Parallel - maybe it's worth turning it into a windows machine

What do you guys think - should I just "bin it" or add an SSD?

 

[ancient_mariner]

Processor wise it will be glacial running either windows or osx. A SSD will help it boot less slowly, but it won't process any quicker and you're probably maxed out on ram already. If the screen is ok and you can use it with a mini, bypassing the computer section, then that's ok, but it doesn't seem worth it to me.

You could probably run a lightweight Linux on it and get tolerable responsiveness if you just want to surf, email etc. My MacBook of the same era used to get really hot just watching movies. The overhead of Linux is lower than the original OS, so it might cope better.

 

[Pound Coin]

Core 2 is slower than molasses... (IMHO)