Powerbook G4's And Logic Pro 7 Tips Needed, Is there a tune up to free up the OS? Options

[dinofond]

Gawd I hate being a OS X newb.........

I need performance help with my powerbook
and am a bit lost at the moment.

Gear Stats:

Big room:
Dual G5 1.8 W/ 4GB RAM
80 GD SATA Main Drive
200 GB SATA 2nd Drive
Motu 896 HD

Plenty of Auralex Studio Foam and gear yadda yadda yadda

Powerbook
1.67 17" 1.5GB RAM PC 2700
100 GB 5400 HDD
Firebox

I have a degree in IS but OS X was not around when I was in school,
if it had been I would not be posting this =) I am a reborn Apple IIe
convert.. W00t! (9 months of OS X in personal life and loving it).

I need answers to all this based on using Logic 7.1 pro as the primary
use of my Powerbook. The G5 seems to laugh at anything a feed it but
the powerbook is bliss when inspired.

Does the new DDR2 powerbook have huge performance increase over the
1.67 (17") that I bought with SD pc2700 60 days ago? I cant seem to
locate any motherboard front side bus speeds anywhere.

Is there a Hard drive enclosure that runs Firewire 800 (IE:1394b)
and SATA drives? Does it have a fan?

How can I tune my G4 Powerbook 1.67 1.5 GB RAM, 100 GB 5400 rpm
HDD to perform better specifically using Logic 7.1 Pro?

Can I do more then drop resolution and omit shadows such as shut off
services with tools (Tinker Tools / Shadow Killer) or via the command line
to improve performance?

I am currently running a Firebox on the powerbook but own an 896 HD
for the main room. I have read the 896 has less latency and would be
much more powerful on the notebook. Is this true? Is it worth the hassle
of making the 896 HD portable? (I only use the powerbook for composition
but can get carried away when inspired quickly).

Is it worth pulling my rack out of my main room and making it mobile
with my Powerbook?

I ask all of this because I believe my Powerbook is underperforming.
I have 8 tracks of recorded input via apple loops and live instruments
via the Presonus firebox on a secondary IE1394A firewire drive (400) and am
running Logic 7.1 (OS X4.2) on a 100GB 5400 RPM Drive. I only have
native plugins running on the 2 guitar tracks (EVH 5150 direct into
the firrebox) everything else is dry. I try to add a 9th track and the machine
chokes. I have run latency settings as low as 128 and as high as 256.

Please help if you can.

Thanks

-=DF=-

[bigyello]

i had a simillar issue - drove me absolutely nuts. i would play 8 tracks with nothing on them and logic 7 would choke.

upgrading to logic 7.1 helped. i also upgraded my MBox drivers - that made the biggest difference.

basically a powerbook only has a 167 mhz fsb, although if you have ddr2 ram, that might double it. either way, its not a lot of bandwidth to work with.

the logic instruments i also find can get pretty cpu intensive. i plan on getting a tc powercore firewire to offload the work from the cpu.

but its also about working as efficiently as possible - use multi outs on drum machines, send to common busses for things like reverb, etc. and freeze your most cpu intensive tracks.