setting up new intel Mac for prepress

[truetype1]

I have to set up our 1st intel mac for our department. With the PPC machines I used to run through a lot to set the machine up. deleting unwanted fonts ( suitcase best practices ). With Classic I would turn off a ton of extensions that were not needed because OS X was handling everything. I would delete unused languages. I believe I used uni-lingual to do that. What should i do and not do with an intell G5 when setting it up?

Edited by: Tim on Feb 29, 2008 10:10 AM

[neotrog]

"Hard work sometimes pays off in the long term but laziness always pays off now." - Despair.com


Don't do anything. For font management you may want to add Suitcase but that's about it. The G5 has enough muscle to carry a lot of seemingly inane bits transparently. As the MacOSX grows a lot of developers are hooking into OS components to solve their problems and keep their application light. You can actually run into a lot of trouble quick by disabling or turning off components. Besides, OSX doesn't really let you at the tasty bits anyways. God help you if you get crazy enough to try and go into the unix shell and manipulate things there! Great way to get information and fix little file permission problems but Apple really doesn't want people mucking with configs at that level. When it comes to running Pre-press apps. in a PDF or PostScript printing environment The G5's are good to go. Here's a far more practical tidbit.

Load in a second hard drive. Install the factory OS onto it. Keep booting of your first drive and get everything configured right down to the bilges. Then boot off second disk and download "Carbon Copy Cloner". Make a disk image from the raw disk file on drive #1 and store it on drive #2. Go back to living off drive #1. If drive #1 fails just boot off #2 and restore the disk image. Snapshots might be an adequate option but I haven't had an occasion to live test them yet. I know the previously described method will get you back to a fully functioning perfectly configured Pre-press workstation in about 45min. If you're in a real high pressure environment and want to further reduce the downtime, but a 3rd drive and restore the image to that, remove it and store it. You can get back 5 minutes and no tools. Only costs you a few hundred. Sadly, you used to be able to pull this off with the Apple disk utility and a bootable firewire external but that seems to have gone the way of the Dodo with Leopard on Intel Macs.

[pmhapp]

For clarification purposes, there is no such thing as an Intel G5. Those are two different chips. You either have a G5, or you have an Intel chip. I think you referring to a Mac Pro?

[pmhapp]

For Font Management, I would recommend Linotype Font Explorer. And yes, best practice is to clean your Mac for fonts in OS X (regardless of PPC or Intel). I'd recommend David Creamer's OS X Font Management for Graphic Artists (http://www.ideastraining.com/Downloa...dsAndTips.html).

The Carbon Copy Cloner may not be a bad idea. Depends on your shop. Knock on wood, I don't know that I've ever had to worry about a Hard Drive failure on any of our Macs in the last 5 years or so (well, maybe there was once.)

But, yea, don't know that's there's anything special to do after that.

Edited by: pmhapp on Mar 27, 2008 9:52 PM

[neotrog]

GOOD POINT!! The folks at Intel would have a cow if they heard me!!! I guess I'm just in the habit of calling everything in a big square matte aluminum box a G5. I'll think better of it.

It's true the intensity of your disaster recovery plan need not be as extreme as I've outlined but still, if you'd like to burn a drive at 4:30pm and still get home at a reasonable hour without missing a beat the next day it's really a stress saver.

[bottomofthefoodchain]

My office is noticing a difference in print between the Mac Intels and Mac G5's. We have about five Intels and about forty G5's. We print to two different Xerox 250 and we use a Fiery EXP250 color server rip. Xerox created the profile we use.

Anyway, The Intels print much darker. Does anyone know of a quick fix for this, besides creating separate profiles for Intels and G5's?

[printshoptips]

I would say make sure you have the latest printer driver. If that doesn't work, find a printer setting that works good and make a preset out of it.

[doubting_thomas]

What application are you printing from?

[bottomofthefoodchain]

Sory it has taken so long to get back to this.

We have the latest printer drivers and the most recent update for the fiery rip. We mostly print out of CS3 applications. Occassionally we will print pdfs.

There is definitely a difference in print between Intel Macs and PowerPC Macs. It makes sense considering they have different processors.

Just curious if anyone else has noticed the difference in print and if there is a quick fix.