Is this all I can expect?

[vlastyn]

I have a Dual 1.8 Ghz G5. I just bought an MBox to use with it. I wasn't expecting ultra low latencies because it's USB, but what's the deal with this?

So I make a quick song in Reason. I then load up a basic template I made in Pro Tools which contains a couple of Amplitube LE plugins, a compressor and so forth. All in all it's taking up like 25% of my CPU when I press play. Except that it stops playing almost every time within seconds due to a "operating system held off interrupts for too long" error. What sort of voodoo do I need to perform now to get PTLE to work on my computer without cutting out? I feel so horribly disillusioned right now, like what have I gotten myself into? I tried setting the buffer to 1024, which by the way sucks if you do vocals or guitar or anything that I want to use PTLE for (and yes I know about the zero latency feature which isn't too useful for guitar), and it crashed. Crashed! I'm so mad at myself for buying this. Is there some way I can get it to like, work? Am I asking too much? Do I need to uninstall all my applications and kill all the other running processes (don't need the dock do I ?) before it'll work? Sorry if am over reacting, I'm just really upset with this.

[Avid]

Are you using a separate hard drive for your audio files, or trying to use your startup drive? A separate dedicated audio drive is required for maximum performance:
http://www.digidesign.com/compato/osx/stg/le.cfm

[vlastyn]

I'm not using a separate audio drive, no. And I didn't have my processor set to "highest" in the energy saver panel. Oops! My bad. That seemed to do the trick for now. I was expecting the worst.

Thanks

[clockface]

Definitely invest in a dedicated audio drive. You can have the fastest supercomputer in the world, but it will still have [bleep] performance if the hard drive can't keep up.