Time for new Mac?

I have a mid 2009 MacBook Pro with 2.8 GHz Intel Core Duo, 8GB memory. Recently upgraded to OS 10.9.3 and fcp 10.1.1 and did the automatic library update with media on external drive. FCP 10.0.9 ran fine with the same external media drive. Now I have a 4 hour project timeline and I start getting the spinning beachball of death after working just a few minutes. I turned off thumbnails, trashed prefs and cut the timeline into 4 shorter ones but it still happens. So now my "upgraded" fcp crawls and dies. Is my Mac too old?

Update: I trashed prefs again and this time response time was very snappy, like it used to be...and then the spinning beach ball of death. I noticed that the render % indicator kept jumping from 100 to 0 and back again but nothing was getting rendered. I went into Prefs and turned off background render and rendered clips manually and the problem went away. So is my background rendering broken...?

That sounds like it could be a potential drive failure.

Run disk util on it and repair permissions, make sure the 'smart status' says it's healthy. Check your media drive too. I use DiskWarrior, but there are other utilities that are similar.

Good luck!

I have the exact same machine. Did the exact same as you. I had similar problems and more. I also had /have issues with my 2009 iMac as well. Ever since I upgraded to Mavericks I have had nothing but many many issues. The biggest pain was the optical drives don't work now with Mavericks.

Everything seems to work fine now as long as I keep background render turned off and render manually.