OK so Best Buy said they were going to replace my hard drive on my laptop and they didn't. They reset the BIOS and ran their little stress test and my laptop passed so they said it's fine. When I ran my stress test (Ableton + Reason on Rewire), the laptop failed. I have a 2 GHz processor, 2 GB of RAM, and about 15 GB of open hard drive space. It doesn't make sense that my laptop chokes on Ableton.

I can basically do all the arranging in a song but if I tr to play it live through Ableton, the CPU monitor goes up to about 80% and then the program chokes. It doesn't seem like this should happen because I got basically the most robust laptop that Best Buy had a year ago. There's something wrong with it but those dad gum Geek Squad geeks are saying there isn't. Has anybody had either a problem with Geek Squads or performance issues with laptops before and successfully resolved these issues? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Peace, Mr. G

seriously... i have the same problem on my pc with ableton... its a freakin hog for sure.. but it really depends on your vst's. try using different combos and use your sends... or buy a new processor...

yeah, Ableton needs a bit of horsepower to run.  Try what Dave said, their "freezing" function works well.  Also, make sure your background processes aren't hogging the resources.