***

Mac,

Lotta meat there, as usual.

I backed the accel slider off a notch and cut screen resolution to 800 x 600, which I hate. This
allows Visualizations to run smoothly unless I start doing other things. Note that graphics are
not important to me except as far as allowing me to see what I'm doing. I thought, however, that
the glitching was a symptom of a system being sort of "brittle" or on the edge performance-wise.

Note that I would NEVER run a browser when performing serious audio work. In fact, when I hit
"Game" button I'm not even on the network. I don't have antivirus, screen savers, power utilities,
or, AFAIK, any other potential 'gotchas' running in the background.

I have two matched sticks of 1 Gb PC2700 DDR RAM for a total of 2 Gb, the system max. I got
another mobo from rharv with a faster CPU and possibly twice the RAM capacity, but I want to
tweak the existing system first. I did increase the swapfile to a system-recommended default
3070 Mb with a max of 4092, although it's not clear when it would switch. Should I just go ahead
and bump it all the way to 4092?

I am using a fully updated SP3 (the system specs were listed above).

The main drive is 160 Gb; the secondary is 500 Gb. The secondary's intended use is for audio
temp files and storage. Half a terabyte seems like a lot to dedicate to audio, and I need a fair
amount of storage. However, I have a partitioning utility (Partition Magic 8.0) which allows me
to manipulate pretty much everything under Windows. What are your recommendations for allotting
space on the second drive?

When running only one or two apps I typically have 75% RAM available. How does this affect the
location of the swapfile? It doesn't sound critical, but I'm greedy for performance, within the
confines of the existing system.

Updating the BIOS has been suggested many times. That one makes me a bit nervous, in part because
I've never properly backed my system up. I do have a UPS which I have had in reserve, so I guess
this would be the time to use it, although I think I only get about 15 to 20 minutes of runtime
with my system. Would that be enough in the worst case?

"My primary musical instrument is the personal computer."