Velarde, I am still a beginner with Carrara, but I know Macs and troubleshoot Macs and PC's as a business. Your iMacs configuration should be OK. Couple questions: 1. How much memory have you allocated to Carrara? You have 256MB ram, give as much as you can to Carrara, taking the systems needs into consideration. 2. Reboot your system and when the desktop appears, choose About this computer in the Apple Menu, how much memory is the Mac OS using, and how much is free? 3. What is your virtual memory setting? It should be 1MB over your RAM. This is the default setting in the memory control panel. If you changed this you may want to click the default button to reset it to the recommended specs. Some people will say that VM actually slows done your system. It does for some applications, but having it set to the default can actually increase performance, as the OS will use less memory and programs will require less to run. However when you add more ram to or above 1GB, the OS will disable VM. 4. What kinds of other hardware do you have installed that requires a system extension. Basically anything that you intall, softwarre or hardware that requires a system extension, will take performance away from your system. Take iTunes as an example, it installs several extensions that are not necessary to use the core program, but add bells and whistles like MP3 Player support or automatic lookup of track names. You can disable quite alot of extensions and still use the software without being penalized in system performance. Of you want, save your extension sets to a file, using the extensions manager and I will be happy to look at them and tell you which ones are not needed. I can also make notes on ones that are required for specific hardware to function. You can email them to paulg256@hotmail.com Wow, this is a long message. Bottom line is you should not have to disable regular system extensions to regain performance. A lot of times an extension conflicts with another one or a program and causes problems. I use the same extension set day in and day out with no problems. Regards, Paul