Upgrade Powerbook?

[roderickelms]

Hi all.

Whilst a veteran PT user, I admit to being slightly unsure of where to go with the newly aquired 002R system. I've seen several threads relating to speed but don't know whether our experiences so far count as slow or not!

We're running:
Powerbook G4.667 Titanium
512mB RAM
OS 10.2.8
PT6.1.2
External IceWarrior 180gB firewire drive, freshly optimised

Our first outing at the weekend was to record a choral album. 10 tracks armed, two instances of delay and one insertion of Altiverb.

Hitting record produced a delay of c.16 seconds before recording actually started. Removing the Altiverb plugin still left c.9 sec delay. Is this to be considered 'normal'?

I ran some tests on a new session of 10 tracks and no plugins. With one track in record the startup time was roughly 1" rising progressively to 9" with all ten record enabled

I should say that all the recordings were absolutely fine - just a couple of messages about buffer settings along the way. Latency is not an issue for us in this type of classical session with no tracking.

The CPU leter was running about 50/60% and the system fairly low but spiking quite frequently.

What I'm wondering is would there be a positive advantage in getting a faster Powerbook (say, G4.1.33 15"), or simply updating the current system to, say, 10.3.3 along with PTLE? Maybe more RAM?

Any advantage in getting a pcmia to firewire adaptor and running the 002 from that?

I realise there's a good deal of experience out there so any reactions to our current situation would be greatly appreciated.

Rod.

[JFreak]

i noticed a HUGE jump in performance and overall system responsiveness when i upgraded my old 667mhz (dvi) powerbook to a 1.25ghz powerbook. both had 1gb ram and a 7200rpm internal hard drive. both laptops were connected to the same 002R and a lacie d2 160gb hard drive.

with the new system i can easily do a live foh mixing having 16 audio inputs and external reverb on spdif i/o. i put out a stereo mix for the crowd, a stereo mix for the wireless monitors, and 2-4 mono regular monitor mixes - i use waves channel plugin on almost every input channel, a psp vintagewarmer or a bombfactory 1776 on each subgroup and master fader, several other dynamics plugs and few delays. very rarely software reverbs. the cpu meter goes around 60% at 256 hardware buffer.

hope this helps.

oh, and one another thing... the L3 cache of the dvi powrebook made it perform equally compared to non-L3 revA 12" powerbook that has a 867mhz cpu. so it's not actually a dinosaur either

[DesertDude]

I agree with JFreak, I have owned both the 667 and now the 1.25, the difference in amazing. with OSX10.3.4 PTLE 6.4 and 1.5 gigs of ram, things are starting to work as marketed

[roderickelms]

Thanks guys - I really appereciate that. It sounds as though and new Mac is a better option than spending money on a new OS etc.

C'est La Vie!

Rod.