This short checklist from Ableton's Learn Live series covers the foundational prep work before optimizing Live's performance settings. The sequence moves through Live itself, your operating system, audio interface drivers, graphics card drivers (Windows), power plan settings, and third-party plugins.
On Windows, setting the power plan to High Performance is easy to overlook but can meaningfully affect real-time audio processing. Outdated plugin versions are another common culprit for instability that gets misread as a buffer or CPU problem.