Upgrading a mid 2007 Aluminum iMac Core 2 Duo to El Capitan question

[cosrocket]

A friend of mine has a mid 2007 Aluminum iMac (Model Identifier 7.1), with a Core 2 Duo processor and 4GB of RAM, original HDD running OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.8. There are some programs which say they will soon be unsupported on this version of OS X (like Chrome), so he asked me if he should upgrade to El Capitan.

So what I would like to know is if El Capitan should run OK on his iMac, and if not, what is the latest OS X version he should upgrade to that will allow his iMac to last a year or 2 longer and be able to run the latest software without getting non supported software warnings

Thanks in advance for your input.

 

Edited February 26, 2016 by zhangm
formatting edit

[zhangm Supervisor]

It should run fine. I've updated a similarly dated iMac to Yosemite. It takes a while for things to "settle down" when logging in, but I've seen no significant issues. As a refinement on Yosemite, I'd expect El Capitan to be as good or better in terms of performance.

[BobSlob]

He should be fine, but expect longer bootups. This could be countered with a SSD, a highly recommended upgrade.