Over the weekend we ran the Photoshop CS3 beta through a series of speed benchmarks. The initial results have been encouraging. Overall we are seeing speed increases of 40% to 55% in most Photoshop features compared to Photoshop CS2 on the same Mac Pro system.

We don’t normally discuss beta software in this tips newsletter. However we’re making an exception here. Last Friday, Adobe released a downloadable beta of Photoshop CS3.

Garbled fonts in Entourage. Corrupt fonts in Safari. Weird symbol fonts in Apple Mail. How frustrating!

Click on any of jumbled font examples that you might be experiencing. We’ve documented a fix for each font problem on a separate post in our troubleshooting blog.

This post includes a fix for one source of garbled fonts in Mac OS X. For other fixes check out our special Garbled Fonts Troubleshooting Guide.

The Problem: Safari, Entourage or other applications show unfamiliar characters overlapping each other. If you’re seeing garbled text similar to our example above, it is most likely caused by a corrupt font cache file.

This post includes a fix for one source of garbled fonts in Mac OS X. For other fixes check out our special Garbled Fonts Troubleshooting Guide. The Problem: If you have the Helvetica Fractions font installed, text in some applications may appear as overlapping numbers and symbols. This font substitution problem can effect many Mac […]

This post includes a fix for one source of garbled fonts in Mac OS X. For other fixes check out our special Garbled Fonts Troubleshooting Guide. The Problem: If you have the Times Phonetic font installed, text in some applications may appear as greek symbols. This font substitution problem can effect many Mac OS X […]

This is one of those tips we hope you’ll never have to use.

Should you find yourself needing to recover lost files from a problem hard drive, we’ve had the most luck with Data Rescue II by Prosoft Engineering:

Link: Data Rescue II

You can download this data recovery tool and scan your hard drive for free. You only need to buy the $100 software if it succeeds in finding files you want to recover.

AppleJack is a great troubleshooting assistant for Mac OS X. With AppleJack installed, you can troubleshoot a computer even if Mac OS X won’t fully start, or don’t have a startup CD handy.

We recomend AppleJack in our tiny-but-popular My Mac Won’t Start! guide. We’ve been holding back this tip for a new version that is compatible with Apple’s new Intel-based Macs. Happily, version 1.4.3 which adds Intel-compatibilities was released this month.

As designers have been buying more Intel-based Mac Pros, we are starting to see that this model is particularly sensitive to the quality of RAM installed. The Mac Pro uses a new kind of RAM: Fully Buffered DIMMs, or FB-DIMMs. Each one has its own heat sink attached, which allows the Mac Pro to use […]