Mac Pro & Leopard Review

After using the Mac Pro and Leopard for the past 30 days, I must say that it's one of the best investment (the other would be Wacom Cintiq 21ux) to date in terms of speeding up post production workflow in Photoshop CS3 and Adobe Lightroom.

It's probably due to the fact that Photoshop CS3 now runs natively in Intel Mac processors and partly because the Mac Pro just kick-butt in terms of speed. The Quad-Core Xeon processor just churns out processes effortlessly. I have 5GB of RAM (read my previous blog on how easy it is to install memory) and that just made life so fast and easy. Someday, I'll max it out to 16GB, (yes 16GB!!) but for now since I'm not doing intensive video editing, 5 GB is more than enough.The Mac Pro came with a 250GB hard drive but it has 3 more hard drive cage. So I added 3 more 500GB SATA hard drives. I "raided" 2 of the 3 hard drives to mirror each other. (Please view my previous posts on how to install hard drives and Raid it 1 for mirroring.) This way if one of the drives fail, I have a back up drive of my most important files such as digital images and videos. The other 500 GB hard drive I store my personal files and personal digital images. With Leopard's Time Machine, I have an external hard drive backing up those files. What's the difference you ask? RAID 1 drives are quicker to reconstruct and restore files than Time Machine.
Finally, Leopard is an awesome OS. It makes Windows Vista looks like DOS. Vista is just too sluggish and a memory hog. Leopard just files through everything I do with my computer. I particularly like Spaces. Spaces is a new feature in Leopard where you can separate your desktop into 4, 8, 12 sections. I usually group one space for surfing the web and emails, another for Lightroom and Photoshop CS3, and third to copy files, install applications, and a 4th for whatever else that I don't want to clutter up my workspace. I don't even need to use Expose anymore.The only drawback is that Leopard is not compatible with some of my software such as Parallels, CS3 premium to name a few. I heard a new update is on the way by the middle of December.

All in all, I'm just tinkle pink with my new Mac Pro. I'm now working 3x the speed of my Macbook Pro which means I have now more time to do other things such as blogging. :-)