Hi: Having your synth on shouldn't slow your system down. I say shouldn't, as I know it does in certain cases. What you want to do is to minimise the impact that prelonged speech has on your system. This is not easy and I advise anyone who wants to try this to go and read Kirk's message about how to do this and how dangerous it is, before starting ... and if you still don't understand what these values mean, ask first. My synth uses the transport driver. This loads with a default configuration of delay time 550, jiffy delta 5 and trigger time 50. I've found that lowering jiffy delta to 4 and trigger time to 40 and raising delay time to 550 will allow my computer to keep on decoding an MP3, for example, instead of stopping when reading a screen full of text. This is really a "see what works for you" type thing, and I can't really suggest good values, especially since you use a different synth. Be particularly careful with jiffy delta. This directly controls the kernel's timing as it configures how many jiffies (10th of a second) it allocates to speakup. Lowering the value will not cause any problems (IIRC), but raising it much higher could cause *major badness to happen*. You have been warned. Of course, now that I've written all this, it occurs to me that your system will have to at least partially boot before such altered settings could come into effect. any chance of making these command line params, Kirk? Geoff.