A stupid question (maybe)

[steveydubz]

I've got a macbook. the white one and it was the cheapest one but i have upgraded it with an extra 1gb of memory.
Im running reason and recycle on it at the moment and it worked fine for a year or 2. However, now, even when i make the simplest beat on reason (with no other programs running) the cpu starts on 3 green bars and pretty much jumps straight to red when i play the beat and then tells me my computer is to slow to play the track.

I have deleted loads of programs off my mac and transferred all my music and other files to an external hard drive but this hasn't made the slightest bit of difference! Basically i want to know what i can do to be able to get my mac back to working like it was! i was hoping to get logic and rewire them but at the moment there's no point as it won't run reason it defo won't run both!

Anyone know what I can do? will a reinstall of everything help? or do i just need to start saving for a new 1?

Cheers

[Astral]

Check what driver its running through.

[steveydubz]

Check what driver its running through.

safe 4 replying bro but what do u mean by check the driver

[Astral]

Check what driver its running through.

safe 4 replying bro but what do u mean by check the driver

Im not a mac user, but if its not a CPU or memory problem (assuming your components arnt fucked) the next thing Id look at is soundcard drivers and latency.

[jsteezy]

This is all based off of my PC knowledge, I dont use macs much, but from what I understand, you havent changed any settings, installed any new hardware, or generally made any major system changes and now its running slower. Probably time to reformat, I assume macs get cluttered as PCs do. But yeah, it seems to me like something got installed or is running on your computer that you dont know about and probably dont want.

edit: forgot to mention to check all your hardware out, do a memory check and harddisk check, good possibility one of them needs to be replaced, Id do this before a format

[steveydubz]

cheers 4 the help lads il give it a go

[Basic A]

When a system suddennly goes down the tubes, Id give it a fair 80% chance of malware... Do some very thorough system scans dude, somethings gotta be hiding from your view of system processes so you cant see it eating up your resources...

Do you have a good Command/Terminal/Shell based TaskManager and System Monitor?

Usually, command based monitors will pick up on some of the hidden processes software monitors wont, and you can root it out from there...

[antics]

Not that I know what the problem is but I know that putting stuff on an external hard drive is not gonna help your cause, as unless your HD is VERY FULL (i.e. you have like half a gig left) it will not affect your processing power. Your more likely to find that the problem is RAM/CPU based as that is where the speed and power come from.

The question that will really help is: Does the same slowness take affect in other programs that aren't audio related, e.g games or general browsing?

If yes, then it is a CPU/RAM problem, perhaps caused by spyware (though macs claim thats impossible ) otherwise might just be something getting old or clogged...

If not, then there is a large chance that it is in an audio drivers problem, have you changed them recently?

[collige]

I wouldn't trust Reason's meter. Load up activity monitor, see what process is eating up your resources and go from there.

[Sharmaji]

repair your permissions.

download onyx for free. run it.

if all else fails, buy diskwarrior and/or techtool and run it.

[Depone]

sometimes your disk can also become mildly corrupt. goto disk utility, first repair permissions as said above, and then also varify disk.

If that doesnt work, then use apples hardware diognostics tool by inserting the install DVD, restart your mac whilst holding "d" to get to the hardware testing screen