Speeding up a Mac Pro desktop

[Drummerd99]

I have a Mac Pro with a 30" HD display.

The CPU is the Xeon Dual Core 2.66 Mhz and I have 2 Hard drives a 250 and a 750 GB.

The system has 5 GB of Ram and an ATI X1900 Video Card.

Is there a way to get this system sped up - to take full advantage of all the "goodies" I have under the hood?

I ama digital photographer and use CS3 and Lightroom 2 - and I feel that the system could be running faster. When I am retouching in Lightroom I get the dreaded "beach ball". That drives me crazy!

Is there a site that would have info on supercharging the system - or a book that is available?

Any help will be appreciated.

I am now a Mac Addict since last year when I switched from the "dark side" of Windows.

Thanks

[Lifeisabeach]

Well offhand I'm curious about your disk space. If you have less than 10% free on your system drive, then you should look into freeing up some more space.

[Chilbear]

My call on this would be to verify the disk, repair permissions, clean the caches. I would also add another internal drive and make it the scratch disk, NEVER making your startup disk the scratch disk and store data on the 750gb (assuming the 250 is the startup).

[Lifeisabeach]

I agree with everything Chilbear says. That is much how my internal drives are set up. Just make sure your startup drive is a nice, speedy model running at 7500 rpm or faster. In addition, you may want to consider getting a defragger like iDefrag. In spite of what many people here say, OS X volumes CAN get fragmented, and very severely. Myself in particular... my Powerbook had been increasingly giving me fits of sluggishness recently, taking several minutes just to boot up. After all else failed, I did a full defrag and optimize and it's back to normal.

EDIT: Oh yes, pick up a utility like Onyx or Ice Clean to run those various maintenance tasks. Both are free and work fabulously.