System Overload/Core Audio Error Message when recording/playback

Question

Well ive been experience this problem for a while now but ive read up on it and done some troubleshooting and think i may have found a solution.
Well what happens is ill be recording say one track or 2 tracks in mono or stereo or playing back about 3 or 4 tracks and logic will stop everything and give me an error message which either says system overload or core audio overload or something. Well i figured i was overloading my cpu so what i tried doing was restarting my computer and then only operating logic as the only program. this worked temporarily sometimes but not in the long run. well i did research and came to this.
apparently its too overbearing for my Powerbook processor to record in 24 bit/96 Khz which is kind of a bummer because it was one of my attractions to my i/o box that i could do that. also freezing tracks will help greatly apparently which i have yet to try but hope will work too.
also i recently deleted about half of the stuff on my internal drive and put my 42.41 GB of music onto my external HD so now i have 54.6 GB on my internal HD which holds about 93 GB total. should this help me greatly? or will it only be a minute difference?
well any more solutions/suggestions as to what i can do to better my situation? also am i correct as to why i think i get those error messages.
ps: sorry for the uncapitalization, i got a bit lazy here
thanks
-Mike

Answer 1

Mike,
Bit depth is more important for recording quality than huge sample rates. If you're going to change your settings, I'd stick with 24 bit, but reduce sample rate to 48 kHz.
When you say you've put all your music on the external drive, what exactly do you mean--your Logic files or your mp3/AAC files? Normally you would want to use an external drive to record onto from Logic. That way your internal HD can run the OS and Logic, while the external is free for all the fast recording tasks. (This assumes your external HD is pretty fast, and ideally is firewire.)
Freezing works wonders, too, if you're processing tracks.
-Eric