One star reviews in the App Stores are a constant source of fascination and the release of OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) has provided rich pickings. Of course it is frustrating when things are not working properly but many reviewers seem to imagine that the problems they experience with their computers are universal and affecting everyone – there would be rioting in the streets if that were the case. Some even seem to suggest that positive reviews are some form of Apple inspired conspiracy…

The reviewers share their homilies so the rest of us can benefit from their wisdom and insights. One common theme is that Yosemite should never be installed on an older computer as it will be unbearably slow…

I write this on a 2007 iMac with a 2GHz Core 2 Duo processor which is the oldest Mac that is able to run Yosemite. It is used and abused on a daily basis. The update to Yosemite was going to be the excuse to clear it out, reformat the drive and have a fresh clean install but I chickened out as it would be too much hassle to set everything up again and so Yosemite was just slapped on top of everything else…

Over 40000 emails (I did not notice the palindromic number when I took the screen shot)…

Over 1000 apps in the Applications folder…

A couple of hundred bits and pieces installed with Homebrew and a menu bar full of stuff half of which I have forgotten what they do…

Not to mention half a dozen terabytes of external storage hanging off the back.

So how does Yosemite run on this aged, under powered, over loaded wreck? Splendidly…

A couple of minutes worth of Activity Monitor monitoring the activity (that is what it does best) recorded with Screen Flow – so they both occupy high ratings but nothing too taxing.

Thankfully some reviewers manage to figure out that their frustrations are fixable…

Whilst others plant their tongue firmly in their cheek…