PC issues opinions requested HELP !

T

T Prior

New member
I'll try to be short..I am not a novice at PC's or recording... I am using an older XP machine, 2 gig installed. This is a dedicated PC, no internet , nothing else...Music only

initially I was on Sonar, no issues, then I loaded up Pro Tools 8, no issues, ran for maybe 2 years..made no changes from the default set-up

Interface is an Maudio 2496 2 channel card...

Last year all of a sudden I started having stalling issues, out of synch tracks at playback, pops ,noises...squeals..etc...

I initially thought RAM..I maxed it out at 4 gig which is actually 3.2 useable... Defragged the HD, moved all the files to a USB ext drive etc..

Optimized the PC to some nice recommendations on the net...resources used are very low...Pro tools tracks run in the 20% to 30% range...
I have played with many of the Playback Engine settings to no resolve, nothing dramatic where it is sopping up all the resources. In the past I never changed any settings , record or playback...

My average project is maybe 10 tracks..with maybe one midi stereo track...in the scheme of things, these are small projects...


STILL

Tracks freeze, stall, are out of synch....latency gets ridiculous ...

I have been chasing this for a few months now and I am now of the opinion there is really something WRONG with the PC... Fine tuning the PC and Pro Tools options have only made a slight difference...

I went from having a pretty stable environment to a very unstable environment... almost overnight, tracks I recorded in Sonar pretty much won't even run anymore...recent Pro Tools projects which I started in 2012 are giving me grief...


I can easily just go out and get a MAC or a new WIN 7 machine but that won't explain whats going on...

It's time to start looking at the PC...

Thoughts ?
 
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If you are running an external video and have access to integrated video or a spare I'd start there. Then I'd pop the 2496 into a different slot.
 
Run a RAM memory check if you can . If you can't it might be a bad stick, with some burnt out zones.
I know this is a common troubleshooting approach when I've spoken to the PC guru's.

With your system not being Internet used that removes a lot of issues.



good luck
 
If you have been running this PC for a few years it would not hurt to back up your data, wipe the drive, and re-install Windows. XP is fine. You would also want to update it up to SP3 IMHO.
 
UPDATE..

I brought the PC to SP3 from SP2..I brought Pro-Tools 8.0 to 8.0. 5 I had already optimized the PC, resources available are excellent...

I did pull out all RAM and reset it back to 3 gig...Ram is now in different sockets as well..It's always possible there was a dirty connector... or poor connection...


I have read where the PT's upgrade may have addresses some of my concerns, of course going to SP3 for XP is a no brainer...

So today after the upgrades, I ran the two tracks that were giving me the most grief and they both ran fine...I shut down the system, rebooted , opened PT's and ran the tracks maybe a dozen times over the course of the day and they DID NOT FAIL.

So is it cured ? I dunno but I can tell you that before I did the upgrades the tracks in question would fail within 1 2 or 3 runs....

Hard to say, the PT's upgrade is actually a complete reload on top of the old so..it's anybody's guess..but the tracks are running fine..at least right now..and they were not this morning...

At this time I am not reloading Windows, all data is backed up to a USB drive. This pc was cleaned and rebuilt about 2 years ago and is only used for recording, and not every day, sometimes twice a month...it's daily usage is way down on scale of things...It's not on full time, it's off 25 out of 30 days...
 
Sounds like you're back to normal, but for future reference there is a very handy tool floating around in the ether that trashes all the preferences and caches associated with ProTools.

I can't say I have frequent problems with PT, but if I didn't know about the preference trasher I probably would be saying that. ;)
Always worth a shot.
 
Thanks Steenamaroo, I didn't even know this existed !

After reading about this topic morning it is apparent that after the PT 8 upgrade to 8.0.5, the upgrade cleared and rewrote the files...as it did take a long time to reload everything at startup...It appears that many users who have experienced similar issues to mine used this TRASH Preferences routine and things returned to normal, it makes sense....
 
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