Digital BW, The Print

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "Louis Dina" <lou@...> wrote:
>

> I have never owned a Mac so this will be a true learning experience for me.  I have to buy CS4 for Mac, but will run a lot of my older Windows software using Parallels software, which allows me to install them under windows.  
> 


Please note... Parallels takes resources from both "platforms" when it is running. You need to assign what percentage of processor and memory that it gets. So if you are thinking of moving from one application to another just keep in mind that the performance of both sides will be reduced.

For those times when you may want most of what that hardware can give in Windows, I suggest that you also make a partition and install Windows for a dual boot. Dual booting is hold down the option key while you turn the computer on, this will give you all bootable options (including optical disk if you have a bootable disk in the drive).

And when I said most of what the hardware can offer under WIndows it is based on what I see with our Mac Pro dual dual cores machines at work. They just don't seem to run WIndows as fast as they should, I attribute this to the bootcamp drivers. They run slower enough that I will not install Avid Media Composer on the Windows side because I don't think it will do as well as running on a single dual core "built for Windows" computer.

And I do hope you are not buying that RAM from Apple, they really rip you off on the RAM prices and you can do much better buying from someplace like Corsair or Kingston.

You should consider getting one or two more drives and connecting them in a RAID 0 array for the Photoshop swap file. You have a total of 4 SATA drive bays in that tower so that would be the system drive, a storage drive, and two smaller and faster drives for the array. Note that the 2.5inch Velociraptor drives will not fit, you need standard sized SATA2 with the 3GB interface to take full advantage. RAID arrays can be set up in Disk Utilities which is in the:

Finder --> system drive --> applications --> utilities --> disk utilities

or possibly from the GO tab and follow the same path down to it. With the level of hardware that you bought, having a fast swap array only seems fitting.