there was an old darkroom technique... adding diffusion between the enlarger and the paper caused the shadows to bleed into the highlights....
you could try this:
on a new layer apply a heavy gaussian blur, desaturate color, then set blend mode to "Softlight" and lower the opacity a touch... a lot of dust will blend away, but you'll need to do some masking or erasing in some lighter areas...

this should let your shadows bleed over the dust... at least in the darker areas..

even better when you consider they took off the copy protection and now you can install on multiple machines directly from the ap store.

it shouldn't matter but it does.
If you look like you got lot's of money, expect better service. everywhere.

too late to help you now, but the battle of the dust is one we've all faced.
I use three things..
I duct tape large furnace filters to those big square fans and set them up to pull air through the filter and blow air onto the subject to prevent dust from settling.
I also run a humidifier before shooting...
last but not least on some items you can tape a wire to the object and ground it on a faucet to reduce static electricity from attracting dust.

I had a shoot recently for a magazine, the set was in the middle of a big shipping and receiving warehouse...
dust everywhere..
"I'm gonna shoot this low key" was my first remark "So we can hide as much dust in shadows as possible.."

Nothing in my area I'd care to join, that is for sure.

With the exception of wedding gigs, I tend to dress down alot.
I don't like jewellery. I don't wear a watch. I tend to wear my clothes out before replacing them. I don't buy fancy or expensive cloths (except again for wedding gigs). SOOOO... it is fair to say I look like a bum most days...

If there is a snob in the room, it don't take me long to spot him/her. lol!

then there is the test... If you gotta ask a question for which you require an intelligent answer, start by asking two questions for which you already know the answer, and if the sales person lies to you... don't bother asking the real question...
taking you business elsewhere is the best thing for all involved, and in the case of really obnoxious salespeople, try to remember they are driving business away from a business owner that might not be aware of the problem.. Make him aware, there is nothing wrong with telling the manager or owner why you walked out of his establishment and spent your money at his competitors place of business.

you can buy (relatively cheap) keyboard covers that have all the photoshop keybord shorcuts marked and colored, or just fiind a cheatsheet... that would be helpful maybe..
I've been thinking of buying one for final cut, as I'm sure I could improve and speed up my workflow.... somedays I feel like a surgeon using a butter-knife.....

Good to know. Rarely use Macs so I don't learn these things.

I just can't go back to a TN display after having an IPS which I can look at from any direction without worrying about accuracy.[/quote]people tend to like what they know vs the unknown.
having used windoze in the past then switching to osx, I can honestly tell you I'd rather get a prostate exam from


than use windoze again.

there is a litlle tab in the bottom right of the window that you can use to manually resize the window upto full screen, and when used with the trick (f3 & click on the windo you want) seems like a pretty easy way to get what you're asking for.
finder seems to remember what size window you used last, so if you for example in Safari, resize the window, then close it, the next time you open windows in safari, they will open up to the same size as the last one you used... full screen as you asked for...
as for the displays, there will be nicer displays when the prices drop, but in the mean time I think Apple went with (what still are very good screens) the notion that most people are using external monitors with thier laptops for the majority of thier work and using the built in screen when they have to.

I know my laptops get used as desktops 95% of the time, so it has never bothered me....

apple would do better to team up with eye-fi for an ipad ap/hardware solution to use ipads as d-slr liveveiw monitors and controllers.