Dress Up Your E-MailKathy Yakal, special to PC WorldElectronic stationery--a combination of fonts, graphics, and margin settings that affect e-mail messages--is nothing new. But Outlook Express 5 lets you create your own stationery instead of limiting you to boilerplate options. (Remember: Your e-mail recipients may not all be able to accept HTML mail, so don't send rich-text messages to just anybody.)
Benchmarks
| Speedmark 3.3 | Adobe Photoshop 8.0 | Cinema 4D XL 8.5 | Compressor | iMovie 4.0.1 | iTunes 4.6 | Unreal Tournament | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| OVERALL SCORE | SUITE | RENDER | MPEG-2 ENCODE | RENDER | MP3 ENCODE | AVERAGE FRAME RATE | |
| 17-inch iMac G5/1.6GHz | 150 | 2:02 | 3:24 | 11:17 | 0:42 | 2:06 | 33.5 |
| 17-inch iMac G5/1.8GHz | 162 | 1:51 | 3:02 | 10:00 | 0:40 | 1:52 | 33.6 |
| 20-inch iMac G5/1.8GHz | 163 | 1:51 | 3:02 | 10:05 | 0:39 | 1:53 | 33.6 |
| 20-inch iMac G4/1.25GHz | 121 | 2:20 | 6:16 | 13:10 | 1:10 | 3:20 | 21.6 |
| Power Mac G5/dual-1.8GHz | 194 | 1:29 | 1:32 | 5:03 | 0:41 | 1:17 | 32.6 |
| Power Mac G5/dual-2GHz | 212 | 1:21 | 1:23 | 5:06 | 0:42 | 1:11 | 38.9 |
| Power Mac G5/dual-2.5GHz | 237 | 1:07 | 1:06 | 4:20 | 0:37 | 0:59 | 71.4 |
| Power Mac G5/dual -1.8GHz (old) | 197 | 1:26 | 1:32 | 4:59 | 0:40 | 1:17 | 32.6 |
| better | better | better | better | better | better | better |
BEST RESULTS IN BOLD. REFERENCE SYSTEMS IN ITALICS.
Speedmark 3.3 scores are relative to those of a 1GHz eMac G4, which is assigned a score of 100. Cinema 4D XL, Compressor, iMovie, iTunes, and Photoshop scores are in minutes:seconds. All systems were running Mac OS X 10.3.5 with 512MB of RAM. We exported a 1-minute-and-40-second movie to QuickTime: Email using iMovie. We tested MP3 encoding with an audio-CD track that was 45 minutes long, converting it from the hard drive using iTunes’ High Quality setting. The Photoshop Suite test is a set of 14 scripted tasks using a 50MB file. Photoshop’s memory was set to 75 percent and History was set to Minimum. We used Unreal Tournament’s Antalus Botmatch average-frames-per-second score; we tested at a resolution of 1,024 by 768 pixels. We used Compressor’s Fast Encode preset. For more information on Speedmark 3.3, visit www.macworld.com/speedmark.—Macworld Lab testing by James Galbraith