Reducing viewport slowness while working on a .blend with lots of particles? I wonder to know if there is a way to dramatically reduce blender slowliness while working on a .blend with lot of objects/particles on a slow PC.

I'm using BI.

I'm looking for more tricks than the usual ones like disabling object visibility, turn them shadeless, send them to other layers/renderlayers, remove shadow casting, you know, all those tricks.

I have 6 to 9 subsurf levels aplied to planes with RGBA video texture, I need to dissolve in particles some dudes for my shortfilm, obviously my PC is so much dying right now. Even reducing the subsurf view level is no good because of the amount of planes being dissolved in particles at the same time.

To buy a new CPU or GPU is not good for me right now.

Ideas? Suggestions?
Custom builds for this kind of task? Ubuntu/win8?
Dramatic object disabling without deleting them?
Other ways to particleize planes with video textures?
*Python magic code to disable stuff?
Expanding on stacker's answer, in case you are not using child particles, you can also reduce the percentage of real particles displayed in the viewport in Particle settings > Display:



Note that you should bake your simulation with this set to 100%, and any simulations with it at less than 100% will not be the same a simulations with it at 100%.

You can also set the particles to draw in the viewport as something other than what they will appear as in the render.



This will probably increase viewport performance a lot