So we all finally got a much-needed hardware upgrade at work. I went from a PowerMac G5 single 1.8 Ghz (read: the original G5 machine) to a souped up, dual quad-core (8 freaking processors) 3.0 Ghz Mac Pro with 8GB of RAM. It was absolutely phenomenal how much faster it was! We’re talking night and day. A Photoshop document that before took me 10 minutes to open (literally – I’d go to the bathroom, get a drink, come back and it still would have a progress bar up), now opens without a hiccup or progress bar at all!

I had a hell of a time slowing this machine down. The only thing that seemed to tax it was Parallels. I didn’t play around with that much at all.

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Nice. Here’s one I’ve bookmarked and gladly will utilize often to maximize efficiency. Most of the time, I don’t use OS X’s dashboard, and it’s a pretty memory intensive hog. Here’s the quick tips at how to disable and enable the memory hog at will.

How to Turn OS X’s Dashboard Off

This concept has really piqued my interest. I think Amanda would even be a bit more supportive of this app/game than the Guitar Hero and Rock Band series.

I can’t wait to try this out and it’d be great to have the hours of rocking out actually help rocking out for real.

Guitar Rising for Real Guitar Heroes

I always love these tweaks, helping to optimize Firefox’s speed and responsiveness. Here are two links I found this morning:

Improve Firefox’s Responsiveness While a Page is Loading
Top Firefox 2 Config Tweaks

Wow, this sounds interesting. Too bad, the initial releases are PC only. I’ll have to keep my eyeballs peeled for the eventual Universal release for us OS X guys.

Filter Forge Announces Series of Free Photoshop Plug-ins

More reasons for upstanding citizens to keep running all those anti-spyware (SpyBot and AdAware are both great) and anti-virus (AVG Free is a great free one for the PC),or just get a Mac.

FBI Remotely Installs Spyware to Trace Bomb Threat

Nice! Check out these easy on / easy off skins. I personally don’t think I’d do it to my laptop, nor iPod, but they are a pretty cool thing. Hmm, maybe with the right design, I’d do it on my laptop, if I had a laptop that is.

GelaSkins

I do a pretty job with all of this. I do need to sit down and organize my Firefox bookmarks at some point though…

Five Things To Do With A PC When You Have No Internet Connection