Problem is the massive lag on my ibook (900mhz, 256mb ram, 4200 rpm hd). I could upgrade the hard drive and ram, but that would cost money.

what i was to figure out is how to strip os x down to the bare minimum and optimize the settings in applications, so i can get the best performance possible out of my current setup.

i'll start figuring that out. in this thread i'll post my progress.

if anyone has any tips, i'd appreciate them.

thanks!@

btw: my setup is the said ibook g3 with DP4, a firewire 410, reason 2.5, peak 3 (4 is beautiful), OS X 10.2.8.

ou jea. i need to get a multitracker with rewire that will run without a million mb ram. i heard tracktion is dope despite its name. can i run reason thru it? any suggestions?!

I would go out a buy 512 of ram before I even powered up. Although a 7200 hard drive would be good the slower one should work OK. Also make sure you have plenty of spare room on your hard drive, I find my system slows down if I don't have 10 gig available on my hard drive.

I'd go and check out some of the freeware apps that strip unneeded files and processing from OS X. If you're an english speaker, running an App called DeLocalizer strips out all of the non english language files out and saves you about 500MB of space. It seems to speed up my machines a bit.
Just Google and you'll find it.

Also try Shadow Killer, that app will get rid of the fancy but CPU intensive drop shadow that OS X uses.

Fruit Menu is good as well. It's not freeware but it adds funtionality to the Finder and allows you to get rid of some of OS X's ggofy animation.

You need a lot of RAM for OS X, as much as you can get, that's pretty much the first thing to do. There are a lot of folks looking to do exactly what you are and that's speed OS X up. There's tons of resources on the net.

Good Luck and have Fun!

Sorry for the late response, but this dilemma just caught my eye....

First, OS X is not OS 9(or XP). Stripping its resources down won't give you any real performance benefits. Look at your set-up! Recording audio is best done with 1. recommended amounts of RAM, and 2. a separate hard drive running at 7200rpm and optimized for a/v applications.

Most laptops use the 4200rpm hd's due to size and improved battery consumption. It really doesn't matter what speed your system drive is... for much improved latency and increased track count, utilize an external hard drive.

Skip all the above! GET A FIREWIRE HARD DRIVE!!! 'Nuff said...