Powerbook G4's And Logic Pro 7 Tips Needed, Is there a tune up to free up the OS? Options

[dinofond]

Gawd I hate being a OS X newb.........

I need performance help with my powerbook
and am a bit lost at the moment.

Gear Stats:

Big room:
Dual G5 1.8 W/ 4GB RAM
80 GD SATA Main Drive
200 GB SATA 2nd Drive
Motu 896 HD

Plenty of Auralex Studio Foam and gear yadda yadda yadda

Powerbook
1.67 17" 1.5GB RAM PC 2700
100 GB 5400 HDD
Firebox

I have a degree in IS but OS X was not around when I was in school,
if it had been I would not be posting this =) I am a reborn Apple IIe
convert.. W00t! (9 months of OS X in personal life and loving it).

I need answers to all this based on using Logic 7.1 pro as the primary
use of my Powerbook. The G5 seems to laugh at anything a feed it but
the powerbook is bliss when inspired.

Does the new DDR2 powerbook have huge performance increase over the
1.67 (17") that I bought with SD pc2700 60 days ago? I cant seem to
locate any motherboard front side bus speeds anywhere.

Is there a Hard drive enclosure that runs Firewire 800 (IE:1394b)
and SATA drives? Does it have a fan?

How can I tune my G4 Powerbook 1.67 1.5 GB RAM, 100 GB 5400 rpm
HDD to perform better specifically using Logic 7.1 Pro?

Can I do more then drop resolution and omit shadows such as shut off
services with tools (Tinker Tools / Shadow Killer) or via the command line
to improve performance?

I am currently running a Firebox on the powerbook but own an 896 HD
for the main room. I have read the 896 has less latency and would be
much more powerful on the notebook. Is this true? Is it worth the hassle
of making the 896 HD portable? (I only use the powerbook for composition
but can get carried away when inspired quickly).

Is it worth pulling my rack out of my main room and making it mobile
with my Powerbook?

I ask all of this because I believe my Powerbook is underperforming.
I have 8 tracks of recorded input via apple loops and live instruments
via the Presonus firebox on a secondary IE1394A firewire drive (400) and am
running Logic 7.1 (OS X4.2) on a 100GB 5400 RPM Drive. I only have
native plugins running on the 2 guitar tracks (EVH 5150 direct into
the firrebox) everything else is dry. I try to add a 9th track and the machine
chokes. I have run latency settings as low as 128 and as high as 256.

Please help if you can.

Thanks

-=DF=-

[banevt]

Obviously when you ask advices, they would either ask you to limit buffer size or freeze tracks or limit your instruments. Limit is such a negative word as far as your vast creative space is concerned. Ok so say logic works but its obvious you are limiting your resources just so your Powerbook works. It has to be the other way around... Never compromise with your creativity and productivity, a G5 workstation will always be your best bet.

I mostly agree with you on this except I don't think limit's are always bad for creativity. Sometimes if you have no limits you may over-do something or add way too much stuff that is either covering up for what isn't there as far as a direction/quality or that isn't helpful to the song. Back before DAW's and huge track counts people were limited to 24 tracks for their music and even before that 16, 8, and 4 tracks and even before that it all had to go down at once. Personally I think that some of the best music of all time was made during these periods. It really makes you evaluate a song and come up with better parts in my experience. I don't want to sound like a hippie but to me even solving technical issues involves creative thinking and is good practice or can give you ideas in other facets of creativity. That being said, I love being able to keep vocals that would have gone to analog heaven if it weren't for the power of high track counts, playlists and virtual tracks and being able to easily edit or rearrange a song completely after it has been recorded, virtual instruments that emulate classic instruments and plug in settings that are saved and come back the same every time. I guess it's all about balance though and that's a different threshold for everyone. Sorry about the rant.