Recording issues on a G4 powerbook with an Alesis Firepod

[the Shauggy]

I'll make a disclosure to begin with that I'm fairly noobish to Ableton, and I'm also posting for someone else (his internet is down). I've done some searching here on the forum, but hadn't found a post that addressed the problem.

My friend has a 17" G4 Powerbook running OSX 10.3 with 512mb RAM. He's trying to run live audio into Live via an Alesis firepod, but whenever he records more than one track at a time, the audio crackles and fuzzes. Does this sound like a memory problem? Ableton only lists 512 mb in their system requirements, but he doesn't want to buy 2 gigs of memory if that won't fix the issue. In theory he should be able to record up to 8 tracks at once, right (8 being the most the Firepod will send)?

Let us know if you have had this problem, or if you need more info. Thanks for your help!

-Matt