Sierra upgrade possible on a MBP mid 2009

It's never to late as long as the solution is in question. Thanks for confirming the fix ;-) Welcome to the site.

Thanks, wcd.maiden, for posting your experience. I too am running El Cap on the same machine, but with 8GB RAM and a 250GB Samsung 850 EVO SSD. It's damned quick with El Cap, and I'm glad to hear Sierra performance is comparable to El Cap for you. On to imaging, F/W hacking, and testing High Sierra. The SSD made a HUGE difference, and at current prices, it's a no-brainer upgrade if anyone wants to keep a similarly ancient hulk operational.

How would it run if you only had 2gb RAM?

Following up, I'm writing from the upgraded mid-2009 MBP! So far, so good, except for this major installer screwup: I had a /vm folder containing some 116GB of (4) Vbox virtual machines that the High Sierra installation simply deleted without comment. My user data in /Users remained intact. I did image before the upgrade, but I'm totally ticked that Apple would nuke data. Or is this an error of the otherwise awesome dosdude installer patch? Dunno, but forewarned is forearmed, people: back up, and a disk image before any major upgrade can save your bacon.

To SW: I'd think High Sierra would probably run like a dog on just 2GB RAM. I would counsel against. But I guess it also depends on what OS you're running now. 10.8.x could warrant a change despite drawbacks!

OK, re: nuked /vm folder, here's a useful thread: https://communities.vmware.com/thread/57...

Apparently I forgot I was expected to drink the Apple Kool-Aid and put monster VM files into my user folder to (maybe?) preserve them through upgrades. I've filed a bug report. I don't think installers should silently delete user data.