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One day, remove the fan casings from the front and look at the heat sinks. You'll be amazed how much dust lives within a MacPro heat sink.

You'd be surprised just how powerful a new bottle of compressed air is. I'm pretty convinced I've got all the dust from out of there without taking the fans off.
 
1 Personally, scientific computing (Elektra, Morate, Unichem...).
2 My wife, GIS mapping software.
3 My son, World of Warcraft.
 
Digital photography
Financial stuff
Web browsing
E-mail
Remote working in to the office
etc... :D
 
How do you go about that? I've dusted mine before, but I wonder if there's some kind of "deep de-dusting" I should do... do you take off the fans to clean them? disassemble the CPU heatsink to de-dust inside it? inside of the power source compartment? finally, the inside of the graphics cards - the 4870 and GT120, is there a way to clean them on the inside?

any tips will be very appreciated

thanks!

Well, I have used the spray bottles but it is hard and expensive to find just air...anyway...
.... I get my household sweeper out remove the hose and plug it into the exhaust port ( mine has double filtration) and blow the exhaust into the slightly disassembled case ( I only take the side off) after I have taken it outside on the back porch. It blows tons of dust out quickly.
I do make sure I am grounded first.
 
I use mine for enjoying the benefits of OS X whilst running all my engineering apps, i.e. Solidworks etc in Windows. MP allows a good combination of the 2 systems OS X + Win 7.

For all those dust lovers, I thought all computers were dust magnets. I recently took my iMac apart and could pull chunks of dust out with my hands!!!

As far as my advanced dust removal device - I use a vacuum! It works and doesn't squirt water into where it counts. Just make sure you don't have those loose screws lying around when you turn it on!!!!
 
Serious answer alert!!!

If you want to convince your wife to get on board with the Mac then take a moment to look over the videos on apple.com. store.

The simple to use video/photo editing software that comes with the Mac can help you to make short movie preview like clips of your family vacations. One of the recorded keynote speeches has a pretty detailed demo.

Also the photo management is amazing. You can make all kids of cool cards, calendars, letters, ect. You can search pics by facial recognition, region, events, ect. Women love scrap booking and this is the easiest tool to do it professionally.

The Mac does not get viruses and the back up systems are second to none to protect those family memories. That's just one program!!

The work suite is both comparable and better than ms office. I could go on and on but if you watch some of the videos you will both be sold. Also check out the unibody video. Very cool stuff
 
Oops.. This is the Mac pro forum and not the MacBook pro forum. O forget the unibody video but the video editing stuff is the same or better
 
internet (porn :p)
adobe suite CS5
space heater

Seriously tho, tell her that it's a purchase that will last forever. Like diamonds.
I've had my 1,1 for over 4 years now and it's still running strong.
 
internet (porn :p)
adobe suite CS5
space heater

Seriously tho, tell her that it's a purchase that will last forever. Like diamonds.
I've had my 1,1 for over 4 years now and it's still running strong.

In fact, a new Mac Pro will likely hold its value for longer than a diamond because the production of laboratory diamonds is becoming cheaper by the second. :D
 
Writing mainly (Ulysses), photography (21 MP) and lots of other staff, mostly professional, but not only.
 
Digital photography, video encoding, music library management and porn.

It also works as a media server and fileshare server for those inside and outside my house.

I bought it as I found the price tag was more justifiable as there was much more scope for upgrading hard drives and ram....... its also very easy.
 
I have only had mine for little over a week but will use it for surfing net, watch dvd's and trailers, music, football manager, maybe a few other games and app store.
I know I could have got a cheaper laptop but after having 2 laptops in 4 years slowly die on me I decided to go for apple as I love the iphone and ipad which I own, apple products better quality not had anything go wrong with my apple products oh tell a lie the iphone 4 volume buttons on side the spring has gone but other than that no problem.

Loving the fact the macbook pro is silent, doesn't overheat and very stable. Just explaining why I chose apple rather than a cheaper laptop that can do what I want it to do.

Sorry thought this was macbook pro thread
 
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Digital photography and scientific data processing, simulations, and the occasional gaming :D
 
I'm about to buy a Mac Pro and there's a few reasons I need it over my existing MBP (2.5Ghz C2D 2008 model). About 9 months ago I started my own company doing software development/consultancy for the electrical power industry and I'm at the point where my MBP is just struggling as a daily development machine:

1. Memory. For me this is more of an issue than anything, my MBP has a maximum limit of 4GB and when I've got Eclipse running then run another process to start processing large network models I'm hitting the 4GB limit pretty quick, especially with 64-bit JVM. Add in a database, Mail, a few browser windows, multiple VMs and the machine just grinds to a halt. I'm probably going to start with 32GB in a Mac Pro and look at increasing that to 64GB in the future just so I can start simulating multiple systems to test integration. Which brings me on to...

2. Virtual machines. A lot of my work involves system-integration and I want to have multiple VMs running with different OS configurations to simulate and test how the software copes with multiple clients etc. For this lots of CPUs and plenty of memory will help and also give me a desktop with similar hardware to the servers the software will run on.

3. Meeting minimum requirements. I've got a document in front of me at the moment for a client's application I need to interface with. The recommended configuration for a "small system" is: 6 core Xeon CPU, 24GB memory, 8x 120GB HDD in RAID 0+1 and 2x Gigabit ethernet. If you move this up to a large system it's 12 core Xeon, 32GB RAM etc. I won't even get into the discussion about why this is their minimum spec, but I need to meet that so that if/when I find issues with performance etc. they can't claim it's because I'm running it on an inferior machine.

4. Displays. The laptop's 1440x900 screen just doesn't cut it for development and while I can add an external monitor, ideally I want two, matching 27" displays which I just can't add to the laptop. Will also help my posture...

None of this requires a Mac of course, but I love OS X and if I can do all of this on a Mac, why the hell would I buy a Windows machine? :)

Of course, I do spend some time travelling so while my current intentions are to put an SSD in the MBP (Applecare is up in March) I suspect what will actually happen is that after using the Mac Pro all day the MBP will just seem to slow and I'll end up buying a new one of them when they're refreshed... :)
 
I use a compressed air aerosol with a long tube nozzle (kenro brand in the UK, but there are equivalents in the US).

I either take the computer outside (if it's nice) or put it in the (dry!) bath and take the side panel off. I remove the hard drives.

I then spray with short bursts of compressed air. These sprays are really strong - so you don't need that much (or to get that close). I spray inside-out so it forces the dust out of the computer. The fans all spin when I'm doing this and the dust falls off them too. You can also fire air down the graphics card exhaust - and all the dust jumps out of the heatsink!

After a couple of minutes doing this there's basically no dust left - and you haven't had to risk the computer by actually touching any components.

Make sure you "hold" the fans still when you blow air through them, its possible to burn out the bearings. I know this really depends on the fan itself, however I have always made an effort to do as it has been known to happen with other fans.
 
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