Time for a new laptop?

[Lightning337]

Hey guys. I got a 2012 Macbook 2.5ghz 4cores 16gbram... regular HD, not ssd. And it's come to where Im trying to do rock music with 10 midi drum tracks, 1 bass and 4 guitars all with minimal plugins ,1 mix buss with 4 plugins.. Not every drum track has a plug in.. and the guitars have 4 each... but I keep getting a system overload msg.. is it time? This seems silly.. I've already made sure logic pro is using all 4 cores..

 

[DM60]

Are you sure you are not getting a message because of the HD? Before I went to SSD, you would see a message in my DAW indicating HD overload. I have not seen it since I upgraded to the SSD.

If it really is CPU performance, if Logic has a freeze option (pretty sure it does), you can reduce CPU load by rendering the track (some DAWs use the word freeze track) that then it creates the analog track, turns off the plugins and saves processing requirements. When you need to edit the plugin, you unfreeze the track, make your changes, freeze it back or leave it on until you are done.

Seems like the Mac should be plenty. You may also want to look at other resource usage as well. WIFI, chat programs, etc. Everything costs something.

 

[Steenamaroo]

+1. It's possible but unlikely that you need to upgrade the laptop.
Most likely an SSD will sort you right out.

Before that, though, where do you keep your buffer size setting?
If you don't know what that is, find it in Logic preferences and set it to 512/1024 for mixing and see if that helps.
Let us know if it does, please.

Failing that, it's easy to find out which resources are being hit hard.

When you're running a heavy session, open up 'Activity Monitor' from Utilities.
There's a separate window for CPU usage, under the 'window' menu bar.
Keep an eye on the Disk tab. The numbers might not mean much to you but a big spike is a big spike.

The thing is, though, you need to be monitoring that when it crashes.
The hope, I suppose, is that your overload message coincides with a spike in HDD I/O.

I used a 2011 2.3ghz/16gb for a long time and had no issue with (very) heavy sessions, but I did use SSD.
If you do switch to SSD and need any info about cloning your system to the new disk, fire me a PM. It's very simple to do and shouldn't take more than an hour or two all in.
No reinstall (of anything) is required.

Also, you shouldn't need to go scraping the barrel turning this that and the other off.
If you have something ridiculous like time machine constantly backing up your system, or some cloud backup system always running then, sure, turn that off!