Table of Contents



Choosing and Configuring a Mac

An in-depth buyer’s guide for outfitting a Macintosh for top performance.

  1. How to Choose a Mac
  2. How to Select and Configure a Mac Pro
  3. How to Select and Configure a MacBook Pro
  4. How to Select and Configure an iMac New!
  5. Buying a Refurbished Mac New!
  6. Buying a Mac at the Apple Store New!
  7. Upgrading Your Mac
  8. Setting up Your New Mac (or renovating one)
  9. Ways to Optimize Your Mac’s Performance
  10. Boot Drive Dogma
  11. How to make your Mac feel lighting-fast
  12. Backup and reliability
  13. Simple and cost-effective backups New!
  14. My Mac Pro: An Example
  15. Testing memory for reliability
  16. Mac Pro Memory: choosing, installing, testing
  17. How to install 6GB of memory in MacBook Pro
  18. Installing a solid state drive (SSD) New!
  19. Monitoring system performance
  20. Recommended External Drive Enclosures
  21. Recommended Equipment for Mac Pro
  22. Recommended Equipment for MacBook Pro
  23. Recommended Vendor OWC

Special Report — Mac Pro Nehalem New!

Configuring and optimizing, especially for photographers.

  1. Introduction
  2. Memory Overview
  3. Scalability
  4. When More is Less — Dual vs Single CPU
  5. Tests — Introduction
  6. Tests — Memory and Compute Speed
  7. Tests — Photoshop CS4
  8. Tests — RAW-file Converters
  9. Tests — Scaling/stacking Images
  10. Tests — Software Development
  11. Conclusions

Reviews

Reviews of hardware and software.

  1. Reviews Overview
  2. OWC On-The-Go 2.5" enclosure
  3. Sonnet Fusion F2 portable 2-drive RAID
  4. 2009 Apple MacBook Pro unibody 17
  5. Pimp My MacBook Pro
  6. 2008 Apple MacBook Pro unibody
  7. 2009 Apple MacMini
  8. Sonnet Tempo SATA Pro ExpressCard/34
  9. Intel X25-E SSD New!
  10. Intel X25-M SSD on MacBook Pro
  11. Intel X25-M SSD in Mac Pro RAID
  12. NewerTech Voyager Q Drive Dock

Trials and Tribulations

Headaches and hassles.

  1. Headaches and hassles
  2. Font Smoothing — Good, bad, or just plain ugly

Optimizing Your Applications

How to run your applications at peak speed.

  1. Introduction
  2. CPU cores
  3. Application report card
  4. Scalability — multi-core performance New!
  5. Optimizing Adobe Lightroom New!
  6. Optimizing Canon’s Digital Photo Professional
  7. Optimizing Developer builds

Optimizing Photoshop Performance

How to configure a Macintosh to maximize Photoshop performance.

  1. Introduction
  2. How to configure Photoshop for best performance
  3. Performance in CS4 vs CS3
  4. Test results for Mac Pro
  5. Test results for MacBook Pro
  6. Using a RAM disk as a Photoshop scratch disk
  7. Benchmark actions
  8. Photoshop tips
  9. Photoshop oddities
  10. Conclusions and Recommendations

Storage Concepts

RAID, partitioning, eSATA, Firewire, and more.

  1. Introduction to Storage
  2. Why you need more space than you need
  3. Why you should avoid Port Multiplication
  4. SATA, Firewire, and USB
  5. eSATA compared to Firewire 800
  6. How to Partition Hard Drives
  7. RAID striping and mirroring
  8. SoftRAID — easier RAID
  9. eSATA PCI-Express card configuration

Desktop and High Performance Drives

Technical performance data.

  1. Introduction
  2. Hitachi 1TB Deskstar E7K1000 Saturn.E
  3. Hitachi 1TB Deskstar 7K1000
  4. Maxtor 500GB Maxline Pro 7H500F0
  5. Seagate 1TB Barracuda ES_2
  6. Seagate 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11
  7. Western Digital 1TB RE3

Laptop Drives

Technical performance data.

  1. Introduction
  2. Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB New!
  3. Fujitsu 320GB
  4. Intel 80GB X25-M SSD
  5. Hitachi 500GB Travelstar 5K500.B
  6. Hitachi 320GB Travelstar 7K320
  7. Seagate 160GB Momentus 7200.2
  8. Seagate 320GB Momentus 7200.3
  9. Western Digital 320GB Scorpio Black
  10. Western Digital 500GB Scorpio Blue
OWC

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