Questions on master buss's...to save resources.

I'm working with a Dell 1501 Lap Top.....2 gigs of RAM....anyway....when I get to about the 10th track...it gets a little querky if I have effects added. I know alot of guys don't add effects until there done....but I don't have that much patience. Sooo, I have 4 vocal tracks....I am the vocalist on all of them. Would it make sense to have a master buss for the compressor and EQ and anything else I put on those tracks. Also....what am I doing wrong with the reverb and delay buss I use for all the tracks now......if I raise the amount of the verb on a track....the freakin' volume goes up? As far as the Buss tracks themselves.....should the master fader be high? low? in the middle? does it matter? thanks greg

Thank you Stein....I'll give this a try.....except.....where you say my audio buffers might be set to low......I do tend to fight with a lot of pops and crackles......I'm not sure about how to set these.....the only thing I've adjusted is the latency on the interface.....where do I find, and what do I do about these audio buffers? sure appreciate it.

Audio buffers = latency. More and/or bigger buffers = more latency, so in plain english: Raise your latency. :) (Or if it's already very high (like >1024 samples) try lowering it. In rare cases Reaper doesn't like too large buffers either.) Also, since you're on a laptop, turn off the build-in WLAN card and the wired network adapter since they can cause the same problems.

Rats.....I wondered if you were talking about Latency.....crap.....I had mine set on 128...as low as it would go. Shit....I think I need to redo this whole bass line that I just finished now. Damn.....The rest of the song was okay.....but I was playing with the Latency before I started this track. As long as I'm on a roll here....how do I turn off that wlan card and adapter deal. Seems like I tried that once, and I turned off the internet for everybody else in the house as well.