Nothing here involves adding more RAM or installing a faster hard drive, though those things will help immensely, but rather I'll provide some simples tweaks that should give you overall better performance. I will cover both Mac's and PC's so if you read this and know of a great trick I didn't cover feel free to leave a comment with your suggestion. Alright, let's get to it!
1. Turn Off Programs That Run In The Background
Often times this is the number one thing that makes your computer run slow even if you aren't trying to use it in a live situation. Lots of programs, when installed, will make it so that they start running when you boot your computer. Pretty soon you have tons of little programs (and some that aren't so little) all running at the same time using processing power and ram which are a high commodity for audio applications.
Anti-Virus Software (PC)
If you are on a PC the biggest culprit is anti-virus and spyware software which is constantly scanning your hard drive and uses a huge amount of resources. Typically there will be an icon in the toolbar in the lower right hand of your screen. Right click on it and select disable. If it gives you a warning that your computer will be at risk just select ok as you won't be surfing the web or checking email while you perform (at least I hope not). If you press Ctrl+Alt+Del on your PC it will bring up the Task Manager window which will show you all the programs that are currently running. This is a useful tool in helping you know what programs are actually running and you can close them right from there.
Time Machine (Mac)
On the Mac side no one uses anti-virus software but that doesn't mean you don't have programs running in the background. If you use Time Machine to keep your computer backed up (which is always recommended by the way) it is constantly scanning your drive for any changes that might occur. This is great but again, you aren't going to be performing a backup during a live performance so it's best to turn it off until you want to backup your computer again.
Dashboard (Mac)
If you happen to use Dashboard a lot and run lots of programs this can also have an impact on your performance. I never even use it so I just closed all running applications in Dashboard so it doesn't eat up any resources. Also look up in the top toolbar for any program icons that may be running and right click on any you don't deem necessary for audio such as Dropbox and turn them off. If you press Command+Space Bar and type Activity Monitor, you can open the program which is just like the Task Manager for Windows and it will show you all programs that are running and how much of your resources they are consuming.
Disable Non-Essentials (Mac & PC)
Last but not least you should disable your Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. They're just another thing using up valuable resources that could be dedicated to your audio application.
2. Close All Applications You Aren't Using
This seems like a duh statement but really it's not. Mac users are usually the worst offenders in this category because they often believe that if they closed the window of an application that they closed the program, when in fact they just closed the window. The reason this happens is because in the PC world it typically DOES close the program so a quick way to check for all you Mac uses out there is to hold down the Command key and then press Tab and you'll see icons of all running programs on your computer. Keep pressing tab to select the different programs and then press Q (you should still be holding down the Command key) to close the program that is highlighted. When you're done nothing should be left except the Finder icon, which looks like a square smiley face, because it will always be running.
3. Hard Drive Maintenance
Clean It Up!
Your drive should not be over 80% full. This can be a challenge for people who have all their pictures and music on their laptop so just make sure that if there are things you can backup and get off that drive do it. The less data your computer has to search through to find a file the better. This is also why I recommend installing samples or large audio programs to a secondary hard drive as this will make your computer run much more efficiently. Also, make sure to empty your trash! I can't tell you how many people literally have gigabytes of data just sitting in their deleted file and they just need to empty it.
Defrag Your Drive
Second, if you are on a PC you should Defrag your hard drive. Bits of data that make up a single file can be in several locations on the hard drive making it much slower to read the file so Defrag goes out and re-organizes the bits of data so they are all together. This is something you should do on a regular basis and you should include defraging on any external hard drive you use for audio as well. If you're on a Mac it's a bit different but you should run the program Disk Utility which is located in your Applications > Utilities folder. For the sake of this article it's best described as a similar program to Defrag for Windows. Just select the drive you want and click "Repair Permissions" which will correct any errors it finds.
You're done! Now wasn't that easy? Hopefully that helps your computer move a little faster. If you have other great tips or suggestions on how to improve your computer's performance feel free to leave a comment.
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