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Macbook CPU problems

Soundie

Soundie

macrumors regular
Original poster
Aug 29, 2007
173
0
Hey guys, my name is Sondre. Im from Norway, and Im new :D Anyway, enough about that.. The other day my macbook (which I looove btw) started acting quite strange. I work a lot with music and my main software is Ableton live 5 and Reason 3.0, now I know that my macbook should have a CPU thats more powerful enough to run one of these programs without any problems at all but it says that the CPU limit is reached 100% when I work with a regular song (not big at all) and the software starts to skip and is impossible to work with. I bought this machine in january and I´ve been treating it like a princess so this problem really bugs me..
Please help so I can keep on making music, thanks in advance
- Soundie
 
no ideas at all? Could it be something else than the CPU?
 
Have a look at the amount of pagein/outs in Activity monitor, maybe you are running out of RAM and too much swapping is taking place... that can make _anything_ skip. :apple:
 
Well Ive got 2gb RAM so it should be plenty to go around. I really cant understand the problem cos my mate has got the same macbook with the same piece of software and he hasn´t had any problems at all...
 
Well, in that case, look for programs that may be running concurrently in your machine.

On the other hand, could be a good idea to run fsck a couple of times from single user mode, or to run disk utility and user the Repair option.

btw, monitor the disk/cpu activity with activity monitor when you run Reason or Ableton to see where the bottleneck may be. (Are those universal applications?)
 
ale500 said:
Well, in that case, look for programs that may be running concurrently in your machine.

On the other hand, could be a good idea to run fsck a couple of times from single user mode, or to run disk utility and user the Repair option.

btw, monitor the disk/cpu activity with activity monitor when you run Reason or Ableton to see where the bottleneck may be. (Are those universal applications?)
Click to expand...

Hey man, thanks again for answering <3 ! So Ive checked out the activity while running Ableton and it says Im using about 30-40% of my CPU. One of them anyway :D core dual! In the program however, the CPU bar goes up to 70%... Now, Im pretty sure my macbook would be fast enough to take on a musicsoftware cos Its pretty much brand new. I can take backup of my files, would it be a good idea to clear out the whole thing and sort of start all over again? Since this is my first mac im not to familiare with fiddling around with advanced system settings and all that, sorry for beeing a bit new on this :p
 
A dual core running Live 5.2 is only using one core of the chip. To use the both cores you must upgrade to Live 6. :cool:
 
Poboy said:
A dual core running Live 5.2 is only using one core of the chip. To use the both cores you must upgrade to Live 6. :cool:
Click to expand...

why thank you my dear chap! ;) I din't know that. Will that be the sake for Reason 4.0 as well?
 
i dont knwo much about macs as i dont have one (im what you call a dreamer..) but a general rule of computer/mac trouble shooting is to do what costs the least first. Just a few things to try that I can think of (some of which have been previously mentioned)

1) Make sure you dont have extraneous software running in the background. Eg: you dont NEEEED to be on AIM or MSN (whatever you norwegians use ;)) while recording/mixing.

2) Check for software updates (like Live 6) and driver updates

3) check for spyware/malware/viruses

4) run the fdisk/ defrag thing that Macs have

5) If none of those work, I would then try backing everything up and reformatting (cleaning everything out and reintsalling the OS and your apps)

6) If that doesn't work its most likely a hardware problem and you can figure out what to do there :) (go to apple store hehe)
 
Dontdothat317 said:
i dont knwo much about macs as i dont have one (im what you call a dreamer..) but a general rule of computer/mac trouble shooting is to do what costs the least first. Just a few things to try that I can think of (some of which have been previously mentioned)

1) Make sure you dont have extraneous software running in the background. Eg: you dont NEEEED to be on AIM or MSN (whatever you norwegians use ;)) while recording/mixing.

2) Check for software updates (like Live 6) and driver updates

3) check for spyware/malware/viruses

4) run the fdisk/ defrag thing that Macs have

5) If none of those work, I would then try backing everything up and reformatting (cleaning everything out and reintsalling the OS and your apps)

6) If that doesn't work its most likely a hardware problem and you can figure out what to do there :) (go to apple store hehe)
Click to expand...


Cheers mate, I will. Man, what a great forum. I feel enlightened :D And about the Reason problem, it is a pirate version (shhhhhh) so that might be the problem :eek: even though it works great when I don´t have a lot of stuff in the rack
 
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