Optimizing iMac for Music Production...

[discofuel]

My 27" 2.8GHz i7 iMac has ground to a holt, mostly likely due to lack of free space/fragmentation of the internal drive or some other reason to do with the HD or OS. Anyway I'm going to reinstall Mac OS X, and copy all my project files to a FW800 external.

Wondering if there are any other ways to optimize my iMac for music production?

Is there any benefit of creating a separate user account just for music production?

 

[Benz63amg]

no that doesnt make sense, how did it become slow though, its an i7.

 

[sth]

- Make sure you have enough RAM (use Activity Monitor to check, especially the swap usage)
- Don't let free space on your HDD(s) drop below ~20%

You also may want to try using dedicated external drives for your music projects and stuff like sample libraries.

 

[discofuel]

no that doesnt make sense, how did it become slow though, its an i7.

A hard drive or OS issue. Booting off another OS installation on an external is super fast.

- Make sure you have enough RAM (use Activity Monitor to check, especially the swap usage)
- Don't let free space on your HDD(s) drop below ~20%

You also may want to try using dedicated external drives for your music projects and stuff like sample libraries.

Just installed an extra 8GB of Ram so got 12GB now.

External arriving tomorrow