Need Advice - Updating late 2014 mini - Monterey or Big Sur?

[beachmonk]

I have a late 2014 mini mac. 1tb ssd hd, with over 700 GB available and 8 GB ram.
I also have an external 5 TB drive with 3 partitions.
1TB for time machine MOS Extended, 200GB available
2TB for music MOS extended, 1.6 TB available and
2TB Exfat intended to link a pc backup/storage (Not used at the moment).

I am running on Sierra 10.12.6.
It is already slow so I am debating about a clean install vs an update.
I have the BigSur Install app and the Monterey is always showing up
in the recovery mode as an update.

There is a lot of vague discussion about Monterey needing 16GB ram.
I don't need the advanced features of Monterey.
I do mostly Internet with Word Docs and Spreadsheets.
I modify photos for personal use.
I play on Garage Band.
I have some other apps that I use occasionally but I am not sure
how to check them for compatibility. I am assuming that there will be
upgrades for them after I upgrade my OS.

I use Total AV and Clean My Mac. I have recent TM backups.
I have cleaned up everything except my 11k duplicate files
but with 700 GB available I didn't feel the pressure to do these.
95% of them are in the downloads folder.

Any thoughts on upgrading strategy are appreciated.

 

[MacInWin]

I use Total AV and Clean My Mac.

I would start by getting rid of both of those. You don't really need any AV software to be resident and running. An occasional scan with DetectX Swift, and/or Intego VirusBarrier Scanner (both free, as I recall), will do. CMM has been a bit over-aggressive in the past at deleting critical files it thinks are not needed, but which are. Around here, you won't find many people supporting CMM and almost nobody supporting resident AV programs.

That said, your mini can run Monterey so if you are going to step all the way up from Sierra, might as well go all the way. There are some pitfalls for you to be aware of:

1. 32 bit software won't run any more. You need to find what you have that is 32 bit and then decide if you need it, if there is a 64 bit version, and what your options may be. I used a program called Go64 to identify 32 bit software for me. Go64 Generally, Apple will have 64 bit versions available (including GarageBand). Most popular software has moved on to 64 bit as well (Office, Adobe, etc.) Some boutique software has not been supported for a while, and is stuck at 32 bit. You just need to see what the issues might be to make an informed decision.

2. Your entire hard drive will be reformatted in the process. The format will change from Mac OS Journaled to APFS. So a good, tested, backup of your data is critical. You say you have TM, you might consider making a clone backup into that partition you aren't using. Change it from exfat to Mac OS Journaled and use a cloner to create the clone. Both Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper! have downloads that work for a while that are free for you to use for 30 day, I think. TM will probably be enough, but it's always to have another backup, just in case.

3. With your use case, Monterey should run well. It doesn't need 16 GB of RAM. In fact, it manages memory better than Sierra, so you may find memory no longer gets challenged as much.

If you decide to go ahead and install Monterey, you can do the clean installation and at boot it will act as if it were new, taking you through the "Welcome" routine. At some point it will ask if you want to Migrate your data. Say yes to that and point to the TM backup and let it run. When done, you will be able to boot into the system and log into the account it created with the same login and password as you have now. Everything should be there except what it knows won't run (32 bit software).

One final point. As you go through the setup, be careful to read what is on the various setup screens. Apple defaults to turning File Vault ON, for example. You probably don't need or want that, unless you are a super-secret spy or an accountant for the Mafia. You may or may not want to share diagnostics with Apple, etc. Just read the screens before clicking "next" or "agree" or whatever is the highlighted choice.

When you get done, the file structure will be completely different from what you have now. If you want the lowdown on what APFS looks like, let us know and we can show where you can read the details on it. Generally, you won't care. Apple tried to make it look and feel just the same for the average user.

 

[ferrarr]

I have the same Late 2014 Mac mini. It is a daily user with no issue running Monterey. My SSD has about 300GB available.

Some apps may have updates for the newer OS, but others may not.

I am assuming that there will be
upgrades for them after I upgrade my OS.

 

[beachmonk]

THANK YOU for this!!!

When I opened GO64 it showed 87 apps not ready for 64 but 90% were apple, adobe, Epson printer, or google apps. I assume that these will be updated with the new OS or an update will be requested by the app.

 

[chscag]

THANK YOU for this!!!

When I opened GO64 it showed 87 apps not ready for 64 but 90% were apple, adobe, Epson printer, or google apps. I assume that these will be updated with the new OS or an update will be requested by the app.

Bad assumption. What will happen is those apps will not run nor will they automatically update. You should update whatever 32 Bit apps you have before upgrading macOS past Mojave.

 

[MacInWin]

THANK YOU for this!!!

When I opened GO64 it showed 87 apps not ready for 64 but 90% were apple, adobe, Epson printer, or google apps. I assume that these will be updated with the new OS or an update will be requested by the app.

Not a good assumption. The Apple products will be updated, assuming they are still supported. Epson printer drivers should be available, depending on the age of the printer (you can check at Epson to see if they have updated drivers). Adobe is a problem if you are talking about Adobe Photoshop, etc. You don't need Adobe Reader as Preview can open pdf files for you and comes from Apple. Adobe is notorious for NOT being user friendly (they actually border on user-hostile). While Adobe does have products for Monterey, they will require you to sign up for a subscription to them. Let us know what Adobe products you have and maybe somebody here can give you more specific advice. I had CS4 at one point, but now I use Affinity Photo as a replacement for Photoshop. Affinity Photo – Professional Image Editing Software

As for the rest, they won't request an update, you'll have to do that. Whether or not you would have to pay for an update will depend on the developer.

Heh! Charlie just said it much more concisely than I did. But I've typed all this, so I'll post anyway.

EDIT: One thing I will add to Charlie's summary is that any update to run in Sierra may or may not solve the problem of 64 bit. Sierra is pretty old these days. But it's worth trying, just to eliminate as many as you can.

 

[beachmonk]

I would start by getting rid of both of those. You don't really need any AV software to be resident and running. An occasional scan with DetectX Swift, and/or Intego VirusBarrier Scanner (both free, as I recall), will do. CMM has been a bit over-aggressive in the past at deleting critical files it thinks are not needed, but which are. Around here, you won't find many people supporting CMM and almost nobody supporting resident AV programs.

That said, your mini can run Monterey so if you are going to step all the way up from Sierra, might as well go all the way. There are some pitfalls for you to be aware of:

1. 32 bit software won't run any more. You need to find what you have that is 32 bit and then decide if you need it, if there is a 64 bit version, and what your options may be. I used a program called Go64 to identify 32 bit software for me. Go64 Generally, Apple will have 64 bit versions available (including GarageBand). Most popular software has moved on to 64 bit as well (Office, Adobe, etc.) Some boutique software has not been supported for a while, and is stuck at 32 bit. You just need to see what the issues might be to make an informed decision.

2. Your entire hard drive will be reformatted in the process. The format will change from Mac OS Journaled to APFS. So a good, tested, backup of your data is critical. You say you have TM, you might consider making a clone backup into that partition you aren't using. Change it from exfat to Mac OS Journaled and use a cloner to create the clone. Both Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper! have downloads that work for a while that are free for you to use for 30 day, I think. TM will probably be enough, but it's always to have another backup, just in case.

3. With your use case, Monterey should run well. It doesn't need 16 GB of RAM. In fact, it manages memory better than Sierra, so you may find memory no longer gets challenged as much.

If you decide to go ahead and install Monterey, you can do the clean installation and at boot it will act as if it were new, taking you through the "Welcome" routine. At some point it will ask if you want to Migrate your data. Say yes to that and point to the TM backup and let it run. When done, you will be able to boot into the system and log into the account it created with the same login and password as you have now. Everything should be there except what it knows won't run (32 bit software).

One final point. As you go through the setup, be careful to read what is on the various setup screens. Apple defaults to turning File Vault ON, for example. You probably don't need or want that, unless you are a super-secret spy or an accountant for the Mafia. You may or may not want to share diagnostics with Apple, etc. Just read the screens before clicking "next" or "agree" or whatever is the highlighted choice.

When you get done, the file structure will be completely different from what you have now. If you want the lowdown on what APFS looks like, let us know and we can show where you can read the details on it. Generally, you won't care. Apple tried to make it look and feel just the same for the average user.

Thank you. It took me a minute but it all went fairly smoothly. I have a clone of the HD and a TM back-up on separate volumes. The install took a few hours but then I wasn't sitting watching it. So far I notice a few things running more slowly like opening some apps and some documents and web pages. And, not all of my mail folders transferred their information. Some did, like the main mail folder, and some subfolders did not. That's as far as I have gotten so far. Only TWO other apps that I use sometimes needed updating. I appreciate your attention to detail. Thank you again

 

[beachmonk]

Not a good assumption. The Apple products will be updated, assuming they are still supported. Epson printer drivers should be available, depending on the age of the printer (you can check at Epson to see if they have updated drivers). Adobe is a problem if you are talking about Adobe Photoshop, etc. You don't need Adobe Reader as Preview can open pdf files for you and comes from Apple. Adobe is notorious for NOT being user friendly (they actually border on user-hostile). While Adobe does have products for Monterey, they will require you to sign up for a subscription to them. Let us know what Adobe products you have and maybe somebody here can give you more specific advice. I had CS4 at one point, but now I use Affinity Photo as a replacement for Photoshop. Affinity Photo – Professional Image Editing Software

As for the rest, they won't request an update, you'll have to do that. Whether or not you would have to pay for an update will depend on the developer.

Heh! Charlie just said it much more concisely than I did. But I've typed all this, so I'll post anyway.

EDIT: One thing I will add to Charlie's summary is that any update to run in Sierra may or may not solve the problem of 64 bit. Sierra is pretty old these days. But it's worth trying, just to eliminate as many as you can.

I appreciate your thoughts. I did not take the time to individually update all 87 apps not ready for 64. As for Adobe, I pretty much only use Reader. I still like Reader for its ability to see previous pdfs. I have been using GIMP for image processing. I'll look into Affinity though. There may be some other apps to update but I'll deal with them as I go. I'm happy so far except for speed but it was slow on Sierra anyways. One thing I like so far is the RAM management. I am not getting the usual notice that my RAM is full!! Yipeee!

 

[MacInWin]

Speed should pick up once Spotlight is through indexing the full drive. That can take a couple of days, as it works in the background.

 

[beachmonk]

Ok, thanks for that. I hope so but it has been a few days.
I am living with the spinning beach ball all the time. Emails opening. Web page opening.

Even booting up the computer takes forever. But I feel I have to reboot all the time. Once I get through the bootup, it seems to have some speed though not what I would like. Then, I leave it on for a few days and everything slows down. Why would the computer slow down just from leaving it on?

I am wondering if there are any things I can turn off running in the background? The activity monitor shows Dropbox as my main memory user (232 MB), with MS Outlook and chrome right behind with a dozen or more chrome helpers tagging along. I have 8GB RAM. And 1 TB SSD with 600-700+ GB available.

I have done almost all of the suggestions online to speed up my mac. Thoughts?

 

[MacInWin]

Opening emails and opening web pages are both dependent on the internet speed. You might go to speedtest.net and test your connection speeds. Are you using WiFi or Ethernet? If WiFi, you might look at what channel your router is on to see if there is a competing router in a neighbor that is slowing you down. Something like WiFi Explorer can show what your system is seeing. In the 2.4Ghz band, it's best to be as many channels as you can be from other strong signals, but that is not always possible. There are only 11 channels on that frequency, so routers tend to congregate on 1, 6 and 11. WiFi Explorer can help you find the least congested channel. On 5Ghz band the situation is a bit better, but not a whole lot. The individual bands are wider, but there are more of them. Unfortunately the manufacturers don't enable all of them in every router, so the popular ones tend to be 157, 48, 153. Sometimes you see others, depending on the manufacturer. If your neighborhood has a variety of internet providers they may spread around, but if you have just one, like my neighborhood, you'll see just about every router in the neighborhood set up the same way, whatever the "standard" is for the provider For example, WiFi Explorer is showing 14 networks on channel 1 right now near me.

Other things that slow down performance are antivirus resident software (you don't need it) and other kinds of "helpers" that former Windows users tend to use because they had them on Windows. You can open Activity Monitor (in the Utilities folder), pick the CPU button, then sort on CPU % by clicking on the header of the column and see what is taking u the CPU. That's probably more important that what is taking memory.

If it is slowing down over a period of days, it could be various cache and scratch storage growing over time. An occasional reboot is not necessarily bad. Also, if you have Time Machine turned on but the backup drive is not attached, you could be losing a lot of disk space to snapshots. You can see that in Disk Utility, but the best thing is to keep the backup drive attached so that TM can make the backup and free up the snapshot space.

 

[Rod]

beachmonk, you mentioned that your Mac was running slow in your first post. This was I assume one of the reasons you wanted to do an upgrade of the OS but as we have found countless times before upgrading an OS seldom if ever fixes anything.
Did you, as mentioned in your first post perform a "clean" instal or an update?
Once in a while I like to perform a "clean" instal to clean out the remnants of previous apps, settings preferences and redundant data.
Obviously there is still a possibility that background applications and processes are slowing down your device but there are hardware issues that could be contributing as well.
You could try booting in Safe Mode to see if your problems persist and/or a hardware check with EtreCheck.

 

[beachmonk]

Opening emails and opening web pages are both dependent on the internet speed. You might go to speedtest.net and test your connection speeds. Are you using WiFi or Ethernet? If WiFi, you might look at what channel your router is on to see if there is a competing router in a neighbor that is slowing you down. Something like WiFi Explorer can show what your system is seeing. In the 2.4Ghz band, it's best to be as many channels as you can be from other strong signals, but that is not always possible. There are only 11 channels on that frequency, so routers tend to congregate on 1, 6 and 11. WiFi Explorer can help you find the least congested channel. On 5Ghz band the situation is a bit better, but not a whole lot. The individual bands are wider, but there are more of them. Unfortunately the manufacturers don't enable all of them in every router, so the popular ones tend to be 157, 48, 153. Sometimes you see others, depending on the manufacturer. If your neighborhood has a variety of internet providers they may spread around, but if you have just one, like my neighborhood, you'll see just about every router in the neighborhood set up the same way, whatever the "standard" is for the provider For example, WiFi Explorer is showing 14 networks on channel 1 right now near me.

Other things that slow down performance are antivirus resident software (you don't need it) and other kinds of "helpers" that former Windows users tend to use because they had them on Windows. You can open Activity Monitor (in the Utilities folder), pick the CPU button, then sort on CPU % by clicking on the header of the column and see what is taking u the CPU. That's probably more important that what is taking memory.

If it is slowing down over a period of days, it could be various cache and scratch storage growing over time. An occasional reboot is not necessarily bad. Also, if you have Time Machine turned on but the backup drive is not attached, you could be losing a lot of disk space to snapshots. You can see that in Disk Utility, but the best thing is to keep the backup drive attached so that TM can make the backup and free up the snapshot space.

WOW some great information!!! I did a speed check and feel I am running pretty good. 512 mbps down and 34 up. I am on Ether with coax cable from the street with only 2 connectors inbetween.

I did not know any of that info about channels. Not sure where I would change the channels. I have been into the router settings only occasionally. I'll check out those apps for wifi. Maybe this is why I get a regular drop on my wifi devices at about 9:11 almost sometimes 10:17 every night. It comes back but the pause can ruin the mood of the movie.

I checked CPU % and found nothing taking up more than 11% and that was only for a few seconds, Something called window server keeps hitting the top end at 11% but then drops to 4%. Google chrome same. Not sure if CPU time is important but looks like window server again is raking at the top. I do have Anitvirus software running on occasion but turn it off. It has found some random malware on occasion.
TM is on and backing up to my external. On that note, I haven't figured out the best way to delete the older backups. My 1TB external only has 148 MB available.

Many thanks.

 

[beachmonk]

beachmonk, you mentioned that your Mac was running slow in your first post. This was I assume one of the reasons you wanted to do an upgrade of the OS but as we have found countless times before upgrading an OS seldom if ever fixes anything.
Did you, as mentioned in your first post perform a "clean" instal or an update?
Once in a while I like to perform a "clean" instal to clean out the remnants of previous apps, settings preferences and redundant data.
Obviously there is still a possibility that background applications and processes are slowing down your device but there are hardware issues that could be contributing as well.
You could try booting in Safe Mode to see if your problems persist and/or a hardware check with EtreCheck.

Assumption correct. Sierra was running slow and I was getting a lot of low RAM warnings. And yes, clean install. I agree with the clean install concept. It just takes a lot of tweaking time to get back in the groove. Thanks for the tips on hardware. I just replaced the hard drive about 6 months ago when i upgraded from the 2009 mac minni to a 2014, but I'll run more checks.
I like to think all technology will last as long as I need it.

 

[Rod]

It sure sounds like you have covered all the bases. EtreCheck Pro available from EtreSoft, Inc here; EtreCheck
It is a handy app for software and hardware check, It used to be available on the App Store but I don.t think it is now. I have had it for quite a while and it seems generally recommended on these forums.

One of our senior members on these forums wrote a great article on "Slow" Macs complete with a check list of common causes and solutions definitely worth a read; Macintosh OS X Slowdown Solutions