I installed OS X 10.11 El Capitan on my iMac last week, so here’s my update after one week’s use.

My initial thoughts – oh dear, this is a turkey! – have subsided as all the original issues I was experiencing have now gone.

Here’s a list of the issues I was experiencing and – where I’ve worked out a solution – how I fixed it. In some cases the issues have just gone.

1) Mail app – something I use all day and I need it to be working in terms of my business. So I was not happy when initially it kept crashing and also kept asking for passwords on some of my accounts, where none of the passwords have changed in months, if not years. Repeatedly it asked for a password, I put it in and then next time it accessed the same account, the same thing occurred. And then every now and then, the Mail app would crash.

The only way I could find to get around this problem was to create a new password for each account with the problem – at first this didn’t work, but eventually did work after a restart.

Now, Mail app no longer crashes and doesn’t stupidly ask for passwords all the time – success!

2) The spinning circle / spinning wait cursor – was all too evident on initial use of OSX 10.11. It would usually appear for no apparent reason, such as when I was opening a new tab in a browser or almost any other common action. Also performance in general hadn’t seen the promised improvements. However, after a couple of days use I’ve hardly seen the spinning circle / spinning wait cursor and performance is much better, so maybe there’s some internal performance enhancements going on as you use the OS, perhaps some form of cacheing.

3) Wifi performance was pretty awful, constantly losing connection and choppy performance when connected.

Luckily I could revert to using the Wifi Extender and a direct Ethernet cable connection to my iMac, thus cutting iMac wifi out of the equation. Internet performance is now pretty mental at download speeds of 120 Mb/s, thanks to superfast cable modem – and no wifi.

4) SplitView – which is one of the main new features – works ok, once you can find out how to use it – thanks to a quick Google. In case you still haven’t worked out how to use it – its the little green circle in the top left corner of every window. Press and hold this and you can then setup SplitView.

5) Finder – initially I had quite a few issues with Finder, especially when trying to use tabs, which are one of its best features. Every now and then a tabbed window would not display properly, with the most important navigation features at the top of the window not displaying. However, again this is another area where after a few days use the problem disappeared by itself.

Overall, I’d say it’s definitely worth the upgrade to OSX 10.11 El Capitan, as long as you’re prepared for a few days of annoyances, which seem to then disappear.