Will this old MBP run Minecraft?
August 5, 2013 6:22 AM Subscribe
I'm thinking about giving my 2009 MacBookPro to my 10 year old for his birthday. The main thing he does on the computer is play Minecraft. Google is being unhelpful, as are the various Minecraft discussion forums I've looked through. So I thought I'd turn to AskMe.
Here are the MBP's specs:
2.8 ghz Core Duo
4GB RAM
NVIDIA Geforce 9400M 256MB
My question is: will this run Minecraft and not frustrate my son? He's 10, and this is his first computer so he doesn't need for things to be the Best Experience Possible, but I also want him to actually be able to enjoy playing the game and not get annoyed with the MBP.
Here are the MBP's specs:
2.8 ghz Core Duo
4GB RAM
NVIDIA Geforce 9400M 256MB
My question is: will this run Minecraft and not frustrate my son? He's 10, and this is his first computer so he doesn't need for things to be the Best Experience Possible, but I also want him to actually be able to enjoy playing the game and not get annoyed with the MBP.
Response by poster: To clarify: I don't live in the same house with my son, so I can't just do a test run on my MBP.
posted by eustacescrubb at 6:40 AM on August 5, 2013
posted by eustacescrubb at 6:40 AM on August 5, 2013
Best answer: I have a mid-2009 13" MBP with whatever the minimum available MBP specs were at the time, except 8gb ram, and Minecraft runs fine.
posted by ghharr at 6:58 AM on August 5, 2013 [1 favorite]
posted by ghharr at 6:58 AM on August 5, 2013 [1 favorite]
Best answer: What version of OSX is running on your MBP? If you're running at least 10.6.8, with Java 6 installed, you should be fine.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:59 AM on August 5, 2013 [1 favorite]
posted by Thorzdad at 6:59 AM on August 5, 2013 [1 favorite]
Best answer: All you need to test install it is your son's minecraft login and password. After that it's just a download.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 7:08 AM on August 5, 2013
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 7:08 AM on August 5, 2013
Response by poster: It's running Lion. Thanks everyone!
posted by eustacescrubb at 7:10 AM on August 5, 2013
posted by eustacescrubb at 7:10 AM on August 5, 2013
I've played significantly more demanding games on an extremely similar machine(like mass effect, Starcraft 2, etc). It'll run it great. All I'd say is blow out the heatsinks before you do this because MacBooks tend to get hotter than most laptops while gaming.
This is a great first system because if he wants to play other games it'll at least run them at medium or low-medium settings and play them fine.
Also, is this the model that has the 9600m GPU as well? If you go in to system preferences>energy is there a "more efficient" and "more powerful" set of radio buttons(wording may be slightly different). I have the nearly top of the line one from the same year and it came with the double graphics, but not all of them did. If so, enabling that will make games run a lot faster.
posted by emptythought at 9:48 AM on August 5, 2013
This is a great first system because if he wants to play other games it'll at least run them at medium or low-medium settings and play them fine.
Also, is this the model that has the 9600m GPU as well? If you go in to system preferences>energy is there a "more efficient" and "more powerful" set of radio buttons(wording may be slightly different). I have the nearly top of the line one from the same year and it came with the double graphics, but not all of them did. If so, enabling that will make games run a lot faster.
posted by emptythought at 9:48 AM on August 5, 2013
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by deadweightloss at 6:34 AM on August 5, 2013 [1 favorite]