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Issue link: https://digital.macdirectory.com/i/18064
FEA
TURE
PUMP UP YOUR PRO WORDS BY RIC GETTER
Snow Leopard
WD Velociraptor HD
Apple has yet to provide us with a lot of motivation to upgrade our Mac Pros. Since early 2008, the hardware has undergone a minimum of change. Intel has some incredible new processors in the pipeline but it may be a while before they arrive on the motherboard of a Mac. Fortunately, there’s no shortage of ways to add a little more power to your Pro while you wait for something more than a modest speed bump.
Memory (More! More!) - $$ XX
When an OS or application says it runs in 64-bit mode, what exactly does that mean? One of the most important things is that it can address huge amounts of memory. That means that if you have 12GB of RAM stuffed in your Mac Pro, Photoshop CS4 can only make use of a third of that. If you have CS5 and Snow Leopard, you can use every last bit of it and keep a good chunk of that 12.5 megapixel image in memory rather than cached on a hard drive. You can also be incredibly generous with the amount of memory you give your Windows virtual machines and load much more of an
Photoshop CS5
After Effects clip into a RAM preview. Mac Pros are very picky about the specs of the memory it needs and woe be the user who tries to cut corners. 32GB of memory from Apple will cost you more than a new system. However, Other World Computing (whose performance pick-me-ups will be mentioned more than once in this article) is one of the only third-party vendors who will guarantee Mac compatibility at a price substantially less than Apple’s.
A Second Hard Drive - $X
When you open a file, particularly those times when you double-click a file to open the application, your hard drive gets a workout. It’s being asked to load a program and open a document and needs to try to do two things at once. Even when your system boots up, there’s a point where the Mac OS is loading while it’s reading your personal preferences. You can get a bit of a boost by moving your Home folder to a second hard drive. In Snow Leopard, this has become incredibly easy, using the rather well hidden “Advanced Settings” button in the
Accounts preference pane. (You need to right/control click your user name to find it.) First, copy all the files in your Home directory to a folder on the new drive. Then, in the Advanced Settings dialog, choose the folder where you moved your new files. Save the changes, reboot and your done. To test it out, either open or create a new document in your new Home directory. Use the old trick of command-clicking on the filename in the menu bar and you should see the new path to your Home directory. Once you’re satisfied that everything is working correctly (and you have a good backup, of course), you can delete your old Home folder.
Other World Computing has a good how- to here: