Bigger, better, faster, more. That is the direction that computer technology has been heading over the last few years. In this day and age, many individuals need a little help here and there to guide them along the way. At Steinberg Canada, we provide you with years of experience in computer music technology to help you out.

Today's high-speed processors can do a lot, but if you are expecting great performance, the CPU can't do it alone. Everybody needs a little help from their friends!

RAM (Random Access Memory) is probably the least expensive, yet highly effective upgrade that you can do for your system. It helps the system to run higher audio track-counts and for those sample-based VST
Instruments, a certain amount of RAM is required to load the samples.

Have you ever been unhappy with how few tracks you can run simultaneously? RAM alone won't cut it. For optimal audio performance and higher track counts, a second hard-drive will be extremely beneficial. Some people believe that simply partitioning their main system hard-drive into two parts is equivalent to having two hard-drives.

This just is not so. This could actually lessen your performance causing your hard drive to work even harder than before. When you think about it this way, if the main system drive is running the Operating System, the program, the plug-ins and the audio files, that is a lot for it to do.

Bigger isn't always better either. What you should be looking for in an audio drive is for faster spin and seek rates. A minimum of 7200 RPMs is required for optimal audio performance, and if you find a drive with a high cache amount, that's even better.

As technology advances, so do the Operating Systems. There will probably come a time where you need to upgrade your OS to something more current. That great OS that you've been running since 1998 has become a little outdated. Companies like Microsoft and Apple both have great new Operating Systems that have little to no resemblance to their predecessors. Computer software manufacturers like Steinberg would be hard-pressed to continue to support a long since outdated OS when the new ones are so different.

Of course, these Operating Systems aren't necessarily configured with audio applications in mind. You may have to do some minor alterations to improve performance. There are some great sites online that provide detailed information on optimizing your OS for music / audio applications. You don't have to be a computer genius to understand it either - these tips are laid out step-by-step for anyone to understand.

All these tips and tricks will help you get the most out of your system.