Hey folks, how is your Mac feeling after that last tutorial? Better, no? Yeah, thought so.

Well, let’s make him feel a whole lot better, shall we?

10 - Use an app such as Speed Downloader from yazsoft to accelerate your downloads;

9 - Keep open applications to a minimum in order to eke out every last megahertz out of your Mac;

But, unfortunately software mods can only take so far, so to really get the most out of your Mac you need to mingle around with hardware (which sometimes definitely isn’t for the faint-hearted). Again it is never too late to remind you all that we cannot be held be responsible for any damage done to your Mac.

Hardware:

Note: good places to look for hardware for your Mac would be iFixit and MacUpgrade;

8 - Overclock your graphics card by using Graphiccelerator or ATIccelerator, but be careful and verify that you have a compatible graphics card and a compatible ROM.

Note: If you are more technically minded you can dump your graphics card ROM, change it and then re-flash it (you have got to be seriously nuts to do something like that, because it’s simply easier to send the ROM to the developer of the utilities above and await or simply replace the card; besides it is ridiculously easy to damage your system).

7 - Overclock your Intel Mac Pro using ZDnet’s Clock Tool 1.0, but do be careful, this is very risky as it can quite easily render your Mac useless (to be more specific the memory correction will not be able to cope up with the new processor speeds and cause Mac OS X’s kernel to panic every time you boot)!;

6 - If you are not a big fan of fiddling around with your hardware you can always buy an Elgato Turbo.264. It is a simple device which, if plugged to a USB port, will automatically accelerate your hardware encoding demands (so long for the “spinning pizza of death” in iMovie or iDVD);

5 - Adding an external hard-drive: while this might not seem uterly important it can help you in numerous ways, for example if you move your “ginormous” iPhoto/iTunes library to an external hard-drive, you free up space in your internal hard-drive which leads to better performance (a good place to buy an external hard-drive is lacie);

4 - Replacing the internal hard-drive: More space and more speed. What Else? Remember that sometimes disk replacement isn’t supported by Apple (iBooks for instance), so it can be quite difficult to choose the right kind of drive for your computer (especially due to size constraints). You must also remember to choose a disk that matches your motherboard’s interface (SATA, EIDE, etc.);

3 - Replace your graphics card : Although not every Mac (Mac Books and iMacs won’t) will allow to do this you can still replace the graphics card in a Mac Pro or Power Mac can significantly boost performance (Maya will benefit like hell from it). There are however, some things to consider, such as the interface used to connect your Mac’s motherboard to your graphics card (AGP or PCI or even PCI-express);

2 - Add more RAM (Ramdom Access Memory) : this can speed up your Mac like hell, but obviously there are a few things you need to have in mind, such as, “Do I really need this more RAM?” (open Activity Monitor and if a lot of that little pie chart is coloured red, you do), or even the speed of the new RAM sticks (which should match your current ones, that is if your keeping the old ones; by the way, to check the speed of your RAM and the memory banks available you can always select “About This Mac” from the Apple Menu and click the “More Info” button and select “Memory” under “Hardware”), or for example if you need to pair them in order to get better performance. A few good places to buy RAM sticks are Apple itself and Crucial;

1 - Replace the processor: Not every Mac will do, may I warn you (MacBook’s won’t obviously, since the processor is soldered to the motherboard), but if you have a Mac Pro or a Mac Mini, there is no reason not do so (still, you need balance out the price of a new processor with the price of a new Mac);

May the code be with you,

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