One thing I’ve always been annoyed by on Mac OS X and Apple mice is that I have to max out the tracking speed to get it to where I can even avoid getting carpal tunnel. I can’t figure out how people with 30” monitors deal with it this way.

A fix for this is once again hidden in the UNIX Terminal (Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app).

Open Terminal and type
defaults write -g com.apple.mouse.scaling number

where the word number denotes an actual number. The default maximum mouse speed is 3.0 so I would start with 4.0 or 5.0 to get a feel for the speed increase. To make sure the changes take effect, you probably will want to log out.

BE REALLY CAREFUL WITH THIS. If you set the sensitivity too high your mouse will become unusable.

This also works with the trackpad, which I don’t personally recommend futzing with at all, but for the sake of being your favorite mac helper I’ll give you the command anyways:

The trackpad has a different default max speed of 1.5 so be sure you take that into account when changing the number value. I can’t say I’ve tried it, but I assume using the same number value for both the mouse and the trackpad would be unwise to say the least.