Speed of previews in After Effects CS3

Luis Ortega said:

I have a 2.4 SR MBP with 4 gigs ram and an external firewire 800 drive for media.
I notice that when I use AE CS3 on it, the preview renders are very slow, and the ram previews are also slow. I have tried all of the performance enhancements suggested in the help files for AE.
I get faster ram previews using my old PC with a Pentium 4 3.2ghz and 2 gig ram when using AE CS2.
Is there something that I am doing wrong, or is AE CS3 just too much for a MBP and requires a Mac Pro with multi core xeons?
Thanks for any advice.

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I've never used AE so can only give general advice.

Have you quit all open applications except for AE? What type of video is it (HD, SD)?

That computer should be fast enough to handle it looking at the system requirements. What version of Quicktime and Mac OS X are you running? Is your system fully patched up?

How much free hard drive space do you have on your drives (boot and scratch)?

Have you gone into the preferences and told it to use as much RAM as possible? This is not set as default.

How big and how complex are the compositions that you're making? I'm running AE CS3 on an original 2.0Ghz MBP with 2G of ram, and the performance is very reasonable. However, there are some plug-ins that can really slow down a full quality preview (CC Light Sweep for one). Also if you have the master motion blur and frame blending switches on and a lot of layers using them it can really slow down also. I usually set the "Shift+Ram Preview Options" to skip a frame and display Half resolution when I'm working on big, complex HD comps.