Booting my G4 from an external drive?

hi!
I'm relatively new to Macs but have upgraded my g4 graphics model with a new graphics card, (Ge force- i think, and a Newer tech processor, as well as more RAM) and a fresh copy of OS X 10.5.2 so that i would be able to run the Music creation program LOGIC 8. The problem is the computer keeps crashing in the middle of my work. The CPU is running at 2 GHZ... the logic specs said that this would be fast enough, so Im not sure if this is the problem.
I think it maybe something to do with my relatively small hard drive?
I'm using a Freecom external hard drive (400gb) to store all my files, and i was wondering if i could boot OS X from this and whether this would solve or cause any problems?

When you say "crashing" how is this showing up? Is the beach ball spinning and you can't seem to be able to do anything? Do the windows all disappear and nothing is on the screen? Does an error window show up? What? There's a million ways that a computer can tell you to go get lost.
Also, you said you added more ram, but how much ram do you have? Graphics is ram intense and it is easy for it to run out of ram, try to go to virtual ram and just crash for no reason. To check on that, in Finder (at the desktop), pull down the menu "Go". Down near the bottom of the menu there's "Go to folder....". Enter /var/vm/ and push the go button. This opens up the vm (virtual memory) directory and you can check to see if you have lots of files called swap0, swap1, etc. If you only see swap0 you are in the safe zone. Loads of files mean lots of swapping going on. It keeps running out of ram. This is just one of many reasons why your computer is crashing so don't give up if this looks good. Note: you can navigate to the directory to look in, but using this menu pick is convenient if you are going to be checking from time to time since the entry seems to stay in there making it an easy menu pick.
Also, in the utilities folder open up console and look at your system log for errors. This is a valuable tool for narrowing down the cause of crashes.
I'm not a graphics guy and these are just to get you started. Japamac and others here do all the graphics work.

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