Cubase 9.5 Elements running slow

Hey steinberg community,
I’m taking my first class on midi audio production. I’ve been going through a very big learning curve unfortunately and keep running into technical issues. I have a Macbook pro I’m working on and have the new version of cubase elements 9.5. In my class we are using an older version of cubase and the school computers won’t let us download any plugins. My issue is after using about 5 instrument tracks with added effects It will have trouble playing more than one track at a time. Is there a way to reduce the size of the file so it can render nicely and not have latency issues. I really want to make cool fun tracks with my plugins but I don’t think my laptop can handle it and I can’t afford any upgrades.

System:
OS (High Sierra ver. 10.13.1)
Macbook Pro (13-inch, Mid 2010)
Processor (2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo)
Memory (4GB 1067 MHz DDR3)
Graphics (NVIDIA GeForce 320M 256MB)

Hi,

You can freeze a tracks.

I would recommend to increase (update) your RAM.

I also have a newer Dell Laptop…
Let me know if this is a good temp solution! I will look into getting newer ram! Thank you!

OS: Windows 10 64bit
System Model: Inspirion 7348
Processor: Intel i5 - 5200 CPU @ 2.20 GHz (4 CPU’s), ~ 2.2GHz
Memory: 4096MB RAM

Myself, I would go for this Windows system. There is only 4GB RAM too. And most of the time, Mac is faster then Windows.