Can my Mac/FCP rig work faster?

Hey guys, I'm trying to get the best performance out of my Mac set up for FCP and After Effects. I don't have a monster computer so my render times are tough. I wanna make sure I am set up to work as fast as possible with my gear.
On a MacBookPro (10.4.11), I have 4 gigs of ram but learned after the purchase only 3 gigs are available, 2.4 Intel Duo Core, GeForce 8600M GT Vid Card and my external HD is a Simpletech 7200rpm 8mb cache through Firewire.
I have FCP on my C Drive and all my media, project files and scratch disks are on my External HD.
The only thing I can think of is the Cache on my external HD is only 8mb, will a 16mb cache increase performance well?
Is this the way you would set up your rig if you had my gear? What would you do differently besides replacing the computer? Thanks for your time!
-Monty

I don't have a monster computer so my render times are tough. I wanna make sure I am set up to work as fast as possible with my gear.
Ten years ago, CoSA (AEv1) took a weekend to render ten seconds of one layer with one effect. I have no sympathy with perceived render issues. You buy the gear you need to do the job or you patiently wait for your economic condition to change.
Rendering shortcuts are numerous, they take experience and testing. There are things in FCP, Motion, and AE that you must not try to do until your project is golden. You work in draft, at low rez, and at 15 fps. You use proxies, you pre-render, you use a workflow that compensates for every shortcoming you have inflicted upon yourself.
You carefully test your system, adding one effect or one particle system at a time, till you understand at a gut level where and when your system will start to choke and then you manage your processes. You find out exactly what services and effects your card supports and try not to use any it doesn't until the very ned of the project's rendering pipeline.
Working exclusively from the external drive is not always best. If your render and capture folders are on the same drive, your system must make endless and really fast calls to read and then to write back to the same platters, you can hear the chatter. With After Effects, you may want to place your render files on the internal to maximize your drive traffic. The results can be spectacular in AE, cutting your drive access times in half (which has NOTHING to do with rendering time). Dunno about Motion and FCP, but it also diminishes the wear and tear on the one drive.
bogiesan

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