[mishmashmole]

Please help. I bought my band new 1.5 GHz/ Superdrive/512 ram) os x 10.3.8 powerbook in Jan 2005. There were so many reasons I bought it. For so long I wanted a portable computer that worked, rather than my old windows brick.
I think something must be wrong or the answer is more memory. I want to use Ableton Live but as soon as I start using VST then the computer really starts to struggle. The CPU meter gets up to 100%. I have found the cpu getting this high and staying like it in other apps too, non-music ones. Even now writing this, I only have Live (not actually playing anything), Stcikies and Mail open. The cpu is staying between 65% & 70% and the RAM used is 352MB. This can't be right. What am I doing wrong? I can only think it's beacuse I have installed so much software, (and taken it out), that I need to do a fresh install and see if it's still the same. Thanks all for your help in advance. PS I just switched to MAC 4 months ago!

[I was David B.]

Please start Activity Monitor (in /Applications/utilities) and find out, what process needs a lot of cpu. You can also kill it from there.

One more thing are the startup items. Maybe one of your installed apps is always (uselessly) started every time you log in (check that in System Preferences in the Users panel).

One suspicious candidate is always the classic environment. I found several times when it suddenly used 100% cpu without doing anything.

[Randman]

512 is about the minimum that you want to have.

[jamil5454]

Are you running on battery power or are you plugged in? Open up System preferences and click on the Energy Saver panel. Make sure you are looking at details then click on the Options tab. If you are plugged in, I would recommend putting the CPU performance on highest, but if you're on battery, the reduced setting would give you a few extra minutes.

I run Ableton Live! 4 on my iBook G4 1.2 with no problems. Granted, though, I have 1.25 gb of RAM.

[mishmashmole]

Thanks. One of the reasons I posted was that I had the cpu & ram monitor displayed at the top so I was easily able to see what it was doing. I have used activity monitor many times to see what is going on. There is nothing really that I can see which is obvious. The application Mail for example will jump from 25% to 2% etc and there are lots of root things going on which I don't understand as my experience of os x is limited. No useless apps and no startup apps either. I don't use the classic environment.
The ram monitor with a few office apps open reports
72 mb wired
287 mb active
147 inactive
6 mb free
504 used

What's the difference between inactive & free?

Jamil - I had the cpu operating at highest but the noise of the fan got too irritating for making music as it seemed to be on almost the whole time with this setting. When I did have it on this option I still had roughly the same problems.

Could it be that I have done so much installing & deleting this has caused problems? Is it the Ram? It is really assuring to know you are running Ableton with no problems. Maybe I should just go for a fresh install. Just like the old days. Thanks for your help everyone but more opinions please.

[ibook_steve]

You need more memory, plain and simple. I don't know anything about this program you are running, but if it a high end, processor intensive app, you need to max out your RAM and keep the CPU running at highest. You may still get the fan going with max RAM. There's not much you can do about that. But you must be thrashing to the hard disk with only 512 with this program. OS X loves RAM. It can never get enough of it. Max out your RAM and your performance will certainly increase.

Steve

[wuzup101]

I would personally go buy myself a 1gb stick of ram and throw it in there. That would either put you up to 1.25 or 1.5 gigs depending on your current ram config. This should greatly improve your current situation, as steve said, OSX loves ram. Also, you're probably going to find that you want to keep it on highest performance all the time while using high end software packages. Might also be time to invest in some high quality studio monitor headphones...