Ableton Forum

My computer has been pretty rock solid as far as Live goes for a year and a half now... its a Toshiba satellite with 2gigs RAM, 1.6ghz core duo, 160 gig hard drive.

Recently I noticed that my Live performance was starting to decrease... I was doing a remix and noticed that I only was able to load in 6 or so midi tracks with operator and analog before I started to get some crackling.

My hard drive only has about 20 gigs left out of the original 160, does that matter? I have about 50 gigs of MP3s on my computer which I could move to an external if that might help.

I have my computer pretty much optimized I believe... I have no desktop background, optimized for best performance - not best visuals, I defrag fairly frequently.

I'd like to get rid of some startup programs, but I'm not sure if I need them or not, for example "Synaptics pointing device", "Toshiba Zooming Utility", "CD/DVD drive acoustic silencer" etc.

Advice?

freeing up some HD space may well help - I've always tried to leave 25% headroom on all my drives.

synaptics pointing device is probably your touchpad, so you'll need that! You could try stopping some unnecessary services though. Lots of threads on here about that...

This is quite good as well:

http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm

This kinda thing worries me too, i think its the inevitable decline of XP - Do you think reformatting may help?

ive only wiped everything once or twice & the last time i did it it did seem to make a difference to Live having an empty hard drive.

im in the same situation, my machine's old but it just about does everything fine....but it really is on the threshold of being scrapped

if you have been browsing on this machine or installing some shit - reformatting will defenitely help