Hello all, Does anyone have any advice for optimizing your computer and carrara for better performance? I got a few tips from Will in the thread of my last post (just received carrara). I figured I would ask everyone else for their advice as well. In particular I was wondering if there are any issues with virtual memory that I should know about. I have the minimum physical ram carrara recommends, but Ive boosted that with VM. The scratch disc I have allocated to Carrara has about 3.6 gigs of free space (hopefully thats anough, cause thats all I got right now). Presently my main carrara computer is going to be my G3/500 Pismo powerbook. Im hoping to upgrade my desktop system (a lowly beige g3/233) this summer. At work I have a G4/400, but I plan on using the powerbook at home a lot, so any advice is welcome. Thanks, Max

More "real" ram is the first thing to get, VM will slow everything down. Ram is cheap & easy to insatll (I have 512meg in my Pismo). You could try & make a minimal sys extension set also although I havn't tried that yet. P.S., I have a beige g3/233 also & it still comes in handy. Have it hooked to the Powerbook with a crossover ethernet cable for file shareing.

hi Max, i run carrara on a beige G3 (266Mhz, 384MB ram) it's not blazin' fast, but it gets the job done. as far as optomizing the computer for carrara... buy as much ram as you can afford. a 256MB chip for your powerbook should only cost about $75. it's well worth it. then set virtual memory to be 1MB above the actual amount of physical ram you have. this is the spec that apple recommends, but you might want to experiment with what yields the fastest speed on your particular machine. next turn off all the fluffy graphics stuff in carrara's preferences. things like UI animtions, window shadows, show logo, desktop pattern and gradient, and dim desktop for dialog. all these things take ram, and only add eye candy to the interface. if you really want to speed things up, make a set of extensions in your "Extensions Manager" control panel that only turns on the minimum number of extensions necessary to use carrara and say, photoshop. by doing this, when you restart, you only load a portion of the system into memory, freeing up that precious physical ram for carrara. i would drop some dough for a cheap video card and a second monitor (even if it is small) for your desktop when you upgrade. it makes a big difference to put the sequencer on another monitor, freeing up enough room to see your work window and the properties window open at the same time. -scott

Well, I set virtual memory to one meg above what I have, and trimmed down a set of extensions. I was able to give Carrara 120 megs of ram. I also turned off all those doodads. It may just be my imagination but it does indeed seem to have made a difference. It seems to be less slugish. I will probably also listen to those of you who suggested buying some more ram. Extra ram is always useful anyway (especially since I use photoshop a lot also). Thanks for the advice people. Cheers, Max

any time, max.

I must be the only person here still using Ray Dream :P