OntheRez Offline Upload & Sell: On
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Tina,
I recently sold a 2010 version of this machine that I'd pretty well maxed out. I'd suggest the following:
1) Go to OWC and buy one of their PCI-e SSD drives (a 240GB is ~$300). Put your system and all applications on this drive and also put Lr/Ps swap space there. It's mind boggling how much it will improve performance.
2) Some folks will suggest that 14GB RAM is enough, but I found filling it out to 32GB really did help across the board.
3) You have 4 drive bays with lots of options. I kept my library and catalog on an older, slower, cheaper SSD. Again disk access speed was never an issue.
4) I used the other three slots as backup drives for various things and also kept one external eSata drive for my tertiary backup.
5) The weak point in your system (and in mine) is the video card. There is a faster 1GB Radeon card out there that can be picked up cheaply used. The Mac Sapphire 4GB is still a mind boggling ~$400. That's part of the reason I moved on to a newer machine.
Obviously you don't need to do all these things at once or really even all of them though I powerfully recommend doing the PCI-e SSD boot drive.
You don't mention what version of OS X you're running, but the machine will support the latest. I have my complaints about parts of 10.10, but there's no reason not to upgrade to it. You may have to fiddle with some 3rd party apps, but your main applications are good. 10.10 is a free upgrade so go for it.
I loved my 30" Cinema monitor and still notice how much smaller a 27" display is. The Mac Pros from 3.1 on are all great machines. Assuming they haven't been broken or abused, you'll get several years of excellent service from it.
Robert
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