Sporatic Cpu Meter Changes In Cakewalk

[weatherbill]

Was wondering if it's normal to have radical flashes of the CPU meter down at the bottom of cakewalk. It hovers around 1 to 4 %, but then it flashes up to 30 or 60% at times, with pops and crackles when it does flash high . All i'm playing is 3 tracks steady. I feel like it should not be doing this and there's something wrong. Why would my CPU meter be flashing up to 60% from a 1% reading when no extra audio is intruduced?
Yes, I have my screen saver disabled and my video settings down.
I have a P4 board with an elpaso 82845 chip set. Maybe this is the problem or that I'm trying to run cakewalk in windows xp, which uses WDM drivers, but cakewalk is made for MME drivers. Is that the problem?
What might be another problem??????????????

[heinz]

try:

- disabling virus scanner while using CW
- disable network if you are on a network where people access your pc(you can toggle it on/off in network properties)
- disable windows system sounds

If you are using CW Pro Audio, you are using MME drivers. If you use Sonar, it's WDM (if you use a recent soundblaster card).

[Paul881]

Also try deleting all extraneous programs one by one(ctrl/Alt/Del). The only ones you want leaving in is systray and Explorer.

[chuchosay]

Sounds like the problem might be from other programs interfering like the other guys said. I'm not familiar with XP, but in 98SE you can check out what programs are being loaded on your computer by going to Start/Run. Type msconfig and press enter. From there you can click on the tab "startup." Hopefully, a shitload of programs appear and that's the problem. Before you decheck any of them, you should go back to the first tab and click on "create backup." If you screw anything up by dechecking stuff, then you can "restore backup."

By dechecking all of the crap, none of the programs will even load onto your computer when it starts up. I have found this to be extremely helpful.

Also, if that doesn't fix it, you should try messing with the I/O buffer size under the Options/Audio/Advanced tab of Sonar. Change it to 32 or 16. If that doesn't help, go to 64, 128, 256, or 512. If none help, go back to 64.

After that, if it still isn't fixed, try messing with the "buffers in playback que" under Options/Audio/General. It's probably at 2--try changing it to any value up to 16 and see what happens.

Good luck!

[weatherbill]

I'll play with those settings