so yeah, how can i make aperture 3 not painfully slow? with the caveat that i don’t want to spend money on hardware upgrades etc (and afaik the CPU/GPU in my 1st gen 24" iMac isn't upgradeable anyway) ...

Aperture 3 does jump well ahead for high-noise images from what I’ve seen, but the competition has edged it out in the cleaner images. It’s always a battle between quality and speed here, but I can’t ...