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These days, you're probably using a PC or Macintosh that performs much better than the 486-based computers of old. The latest hard drives can deliver data much faster than a recorder can burn it, and today's burnproof recorders no longer fear multitasking and disk-intensive applications. However, you can't overlook optimizing and fine-tuning your PC for two important reasons:
- First, you may not be lucky enough to own a state-of-the-art computer (meaning that it's less than a year old). If both your computer and your drive have been hanging around for three years or more, optimization is just as important as ever.
- Second, optimization helps your entire system run like the Six Million Dollar Man: better, faster, and farther. Even if your computer doesn't sport a CD or DVD recorder right now, you should optimize your system.
Here are a few recording tips and tricks that you'll want to pay heed to:
 | - Avoid disk-intensive, memory-hungry behemoths. Follow this advice while you're recording, anyway. In other words, if you don't have a burnproof drive, launching programs like Microsoft Outlook, Adobe Photoshop, or Macromedia Flash during that burn is not a good idea. They simply consume too much system memory and thrash your hard drive too actively to cooperate well with optical storage.
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- Give your recording software some elbowroom. Is Mac OS 9.2 your recording environment of choice? Do you have at least 64MB RAM? Then you need to reserve additional application memory for your recording software, which can use the memory for all sorts of good things.
If you're using Mac OS 9.2, follow these steps to increase the memory that is allocated to your recording program:
• 1. From the Finder, click the recording program's icon once to highlight it.
• 2. Choose File --> Get Info.
• 3. Click Show and choose Memory.
• 4. In the Preferred Size text box, enter a larger amount of RAM. As a rule, double the figure, but you should add at least 1024KB, or 1MB, of extra memory.
• 5. Click the Close button to close the dialog box and save your changes.
- Speed up your hard drive. Here's a great tweak for PC owners running Windows 98 and Windows Me. This tweak can increase your hard drive's performance:
• 1. Right-click the My Computer icon on your desktop and choose Properties from the menu that appears.
• 2. Click the Performance tab and click the File System button to display the File System Properties dialog box.
• 3. Select Network Server from the Typical Role of This Computer drop-down list box. Drag the Read-Ahead Optimization slider to Full (if it's not there already).
• 4. To save your changes, click the OK button to exit the File System Properties dialog box and click the OK button again to return to the desktop.
• Note that you may have to reboot your system after this step.
 | - Beware the flagged-out laptop. Laptop owners can be proud of their computers, but a loss of battery power has caused the premature demise of many a recording session. If you're using a laptop to burn a CD or DVD while you're on the road, use your AC adapter if at all possible — and if not, make sure that your battery is fully charged and can last for at least 30 minutes. Also, remember that most laptops automatically switch to standby mode if their battery power levels drop below a certain point, so don't cut things too closely!
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