Any Recommended Tweeks for OS9.2?, Performance Tips Options

Hello.

I am a relative newbie to Macs and the depths of it's OS's. I had just finally got me a G4 1Ghz Dualie w/1.5GB ram, a few months back, and its performance is not too bad,,, I must confess I was expecting something a bit more spectacular. Perhaps, this is simply due to the simple fact that I have no clue yet how to optimize my machines performance. Can you suggest any real good, tried and tested tweeks to help improve overall system performances and stuff for us neophite or even intermediate Mac musicians?

One example of a concern: When I try to load an Instrument or even a sound in Reason 1.0.1, it seems to hang for a while, takes quite a bit longer for the Reason module to load and finally appear (approx 8-12 sec!!!) on my G4 as it would on my lil P3 500Mhz peecee beastie (within 1-3 sec). Why is this? There has got to be a tweek for this, I even tried boosting reasons memory to almost twice the required amount

Another issue I am having is Macs retartedly SLOW browsers, any good suggestions for a nice quick browser? or any tweeks to speed up a relatively slow browser like,,, oh, lets say: IE ,or what have you?

Oh, and how the heck do we best defrag our drives??? My mantra used to be 'Defrag Daily' until I got a Mac.

Thanks for any help. Cheers!

[Synthetic]

hey.... glad to see that a PC user has seen the light and went to Mac hehe. I can give you a few tips that might help but not sure if you know them yet or not. First, if you have 256mb of ram or more... turn virtual ram off in memory control panels. Doesn't work well with audio apps anyhow. Also, go to your extensions manager in control panels and select mac OS9.2 base set... then make a duplicate and name this set music set. Now go through the list of control panels and extensions and turn on any that you may need for any of your audio apps such as Reason etc. Now reboot and use this set for running music apps. This frees up a little cpu speed and RAM for music apps. Also set your disk cache in memory control panels to something around 512k... recommended by most music apps. This may help you a bit.

As far as defragging... you will need a copy of Norton Utilities and run speed disk on your drives. Sometimes easiest method is to partition a big drive and use one partition just for music recording... then you can simply erase the disk inbetween recording sessions to keep it running smoothly. Also... don't know if you know about rebuilding desktop but hold apple+option button when booting to rebuild desktop file every once in awhile helps too.