I'm Joining the Majority by Putting the Mac Aside in 2005 (by Jeremy Zawodny): "A simple way of increasing the perceived speed of OS X, at least in one aspect:

Open a terminal, and type the following:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSWindowResizeTime .001

(Then hit enter, of course)

Applications started after you do this will have 'sheets' that snap open, instead of slowly oozing out.

The change does not require a restart, and it is persistent, so you need not type this in at every login. It's stored in your defaults database."