I’ve owned the Sharp Aquos LC37GP1U LCD Gaming HDTV since March and overall, I’ve been very impressed with it. The LC37GP1U was designed specifically for gaming with a feature called the “Viper Drive”, which reduces lag and response times associated with LCDs to imperceptible levels.

Having recently bought a PS3 to make full use of this feature, I can say that the Viper Drive works as advertised, even in full 1080P resolution. This feature minimizes the processing that occurs when the set receives its signal via HMDI, similar to a pass through that allows the picture to be displayed faster. The low 6 second response time of the LCD also helps in that regard.

Samsung offers a similar gaming mode but my understanding is that it only reduces lag by about 30 percent.

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TinkerTool is another great shareware application that gives you access to preference settings that are hidden in OS X. It’s very useful for tweaking your systems, especially for older models where you want to reduce as much resources as possible when running OS X Server.

One example would be to disable Widgets from being activated, which can often happen by accident. Widgets may be useful, but they are enormous memory hogs that you’ll want to avoid in a server setting.

Other tweaks of interest is the ability to turn off extraneous eyecandy within the Finder that can slow down your system.

Download TinkerTool.

In case you haven’t heard, Mike Bommbich’s Carbon Copy Cloner is up to version 3.

This is a really great piece of software for creating backups and images of your drive. It’s very useful for scheduling backups automatically so you’ll be ready in the unfortunate event of catastrophic drive failure. Things fall apart you know.

It will also come in very handy in case you mess something up while tinkering within the guts of OS X Server.

Download Carbon Copy Cloner.