Photoshop install on an older macbook

DopeToni  wrote I believe the Macbook is from the year 2009, has a 2.26 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2 GB 1067 MHz DDR3 of Memory, and an NVIDIA GeForce 9400M 256 MB. It's currently running OS X Yosemite Version 10.10.5. Im just trying to install any possible version of the applications for school using a student account. As far as I know I can't install the latest versions of the applications.

Realistically, that is not going to give you a good user experience, if it works at all.   It's good that it has a separate graphics card, but 2Gb RAM is woefully short.   Is it even 64 bit?

Known issues - Running Photoshop CC on macOS 10.13 High Sierra

Known issues - Running Photoshop CC on macOS 10.12 Sierra

Mac OS X Yosemite (10.10) and Adobe Creative Cloud compatibility FAQ

From my memory, Photoshop started becoming problematic and hungry for RAM with CS4.  Most people were running 32 bit operating systems back then, and probably 4Gb RAM of which only 3.5Gb was accessible because of the 32 bit OS, so Photoshop could only access about 1.8Gb.  This meant that things like printing would cause a certain crash because there was no system memory available.  Third party plugins like Topaz would also crash for the same reason.  It was worth remembering that Photoshop could use Scratch space, although it would slow things down, and Windows or OSX could use the Page File or its OSX equivalent.

By the time we got to CS5 it was dire, and 4Gb RAM was not cutting it, although at least we were getting into 64 bit hardware so we could now use _all_ of our 4Gb if that's all we had.  So my gut feeling is that you'd need to be looking for CS2 or CS3 with the hardware you described.

Good luck and please let us know how you get on. There will be other people who will benefit from your experience going forward.