Are these symptoms time for a new PC?

[Muddy T-Bone]

Im running Reaper 4 with a Prosunus 44VSL on a laptop with -
XP pro SP3
Intel core 2 duo CPU @1.66ghz, 980 MHz
3 g RAM

I understand that this likely way below minimums.

The symptoms are 1) when I'm working with the tutorial reaper song, All Through the Night, I've added a vocal harmony track to help me learn Reaper functionality, along with a reverb send on th harmony track. The laptop will freeze and lock up sometimes. In addition, I'm getting some clicks on that track when I have the reverb send turned on that diminish when I turn the send off. This tells me I'm running out of processor power or RAM. My input level was recorded low, -18db, so I don't believe I'm clipping input.

I turned off wifi and virus software and the clicking with reverb on went away, indicating I freed up some resources.

Once I get up and running, I can see my songs taking up 12 to 16 tracks with associated EFX .

I'm pretty sure that my laptop is just woefully inadequate to properly run reaper, but wanted some options before I drop more money on a new PC.

Any thoughts suggestions, greatly appreciated.

 

[allegro1650]

1. Windows laptops are notorious for hoarding system memory for video processing. Get some more RAM if possible.
2. Unless you're using this computer for other purposes, use the Control Panel to drop the video options to the lowest resolution/display settings, and skip the pretty stuff.
3. Right-click the taskbar at the bottom of your screen, and check Start Task Manager/Processes to see if there are any unnecessary running programs.
(Big hairy scary WARNING: make sure you know right from wrong before you do number 3! Google for answers as to which programs are eating up RAM, and which are vital for computer function. The wrong move will turn your laptop into a brick.)
4. De-fragment you hard drive on a regular basis (every week to 10 days). Picture an old-school librarian on one of those ladders with the wheels at the bottom, and the rails on top. That's the head of your hard drive, searching for bits of info. If everything's pretty much centered in one place, it takes less time to grab everything and record/play it all back.
5. Get a separate drive for storing recording data (stems/folders/MIDI/projects) and keep the on-board drive for program data. That way, the system drive will have less to cope with.

A dual-core should be fast enough. That's one of the nice things about Reaper; it's not a CPU hog.

Other than that, it's not always the computer's fault! Check your latency settings; Just backing off a hair or two may make the difference, and not have any difference in monitoring for multi-tracking.

 

[TimOBrien]

Are you running the songs off the internal hard drive?
They are very slow AND the o/s and services need to do housekeeping. You should be running projects off a secondary drive.

Freeze your tracks a lot.
If you print-to-disk to where you are only running stems with no plugs for final mixing you stop a LOT of cpu hits.
(don't delete the old tracks, just mute them in case you need to edit them again)
In my final projects on my older computers, I worked down to one track per instrument for final mixing.

 

[Steenamaroo]

There's a lot you can do.
3gb ram is a strange number for that generation.
Chances are your mobo runs dual channel and would prefer 2gb or 4gb so look into an upgrade perhaps?

Killing unnecessary processes was good advice. As mentioned though, be sure before you kill stuff.

This needs done per reboot, but there's a permanent way. Click start -> run -> msconfig.
You'll have a tab for services and for startup.
Uncheck anything that you KNOW you don't need.
Under services you can click 'hide microsoft services' to make it easier to see what's what.

Get into add/remove programs and properly remove anything that isn't necessary.
Maybe there are toolbars and search bars and all that crap?

SSD hard drive is a great way to speed up any laptop. People always weigh in to talk about 'facts and figures' explaining how a 5400 hard drive is adequate for eight million tracks at 16bit 44.1khz or whatever.
It isn't.
In the real world an SSD will yield a big performance increase across the board.

You don't even need to break the bank. An intel x25m80 gb is probably considered out of date now, but it'll still kill compared to what you know.

Also as mentioned, keep your sessions and wavs on a separate hard drive if possible.
This is less of an issue if you're using an SSD for system but it's still recommended.

Hmm. What else?
I don't know how much it helps in the real world but out of (old) habit I disable all visual frills.
You're on XP so go to control panel>system> and look through the advanced options. You can adjust display for best performance, disable themes, disable power saving measures, disable screen savers and backgrounds. All of that guff.
If you're comfortable with it disable automatic updates and system restore.
Uncheck 'automatically check for updates' in any software you can think of.
If it helps, it helps.

Efficient DAW management will help a lot. Tim mentioned freezing tracks. That's good.
If you're using 10 high pass filters, don't. Just use a bus/aux track and one HPF.

Same with reverbs and compressors. Don't use several instances of a verb for one type of verb. Bus them together.

There's probably other hardware you could kill too. Bluetooth, LAN, modem? Might be worth a try.



Beyond that, reinstall windows.
I've had several machines that I just couldn't speed up to factory performance without a reinstall.