I don’t know what it is with Adobe Flash on the Macintosh platform but it’s a CPU hog. Safari is my main browser and any page utilizing Flash causes the spinning beach ball for a number of seconds, rendering the computer almost useless until Flash is good and ready to relinquish the CPU.

Waiting for pages to load was more than I could bear. Some searching unearthed the Click2Flash plug-in for Safari which inserts placeholders for every Flash element on a page.

No more waiting to load and if you wan to use a Flash object (such as the YouTube video player) just click the word “Flash” in the placeholder to enable it.

Click2Flash has options to load a single Flash object on a webpage, all of them, or whitelist the entire site so Flash objects are always visible.

Last week I purchased the upgrade version of Final Cut Studio 3 for use on a clean installation of OS X 10.6. Before proceeding I was curious to know what limitations would be enforced for the upgrade version.

• Could I perform a clean installation of FCS3?
• What sort of serial numbers would my retail upgrade accept?

The answers alluded me on Google so I plunged ahead. Let’s just say that Apple isn’t stringent on either point.

Clean Install – No Problem

The drive I’m using has the latest version of 10.6 installed – nothing else. I popped in the FCS3 Install DVD, clicked through the prompts and the installation proceeded without issue.

Serial Number Switcheroo

During install I was asked to enter my upgrade serial number and then my original serial number (see image). If this were not a clean install I’m guessing the old serial number would have automatically been found.

I had three serial numbers at my disposal: Retail, Not-for-Resale, and Volume. For the sake of experimentation I used the Volume serial number and the install continued without incident.

It appears Apple doesn’t check the category of serial number to ensure the Original/Upgrade serials are a match. Because the Volume serial worked it makes me wonder if the NFR would as well. This probably violates the EULA but that’s another subject entirely.