PC Problem with Music...

[The Germ]

I have A Sony Vaio laptop

Pentium 4
CPU 3.06Mhz
704mb of Ram

i use Cubase sx2

i had 512 of ram just got another 512 so i have 700+

i find that my cpu is burning up when i add plugins to my audio tracks and midi tracks.

Why should this be so if i have a decent amount of ram...

i am eventually going to upgrade to another 512 so i will have 1 gig..

But my sony vaio can only be expanded up to 1 gig so im limited...

Should i sell my laptop and go Desktop i have never been a big fan of macs

Any help would be apreciated

Jeremy

[dan the acid man]

im a bit confused here, you say you have 700Mb of RAM, but then you say you have 2 sticks of 512Mb which would be 1Gb.

Also what do you mean by burning up, is it getting hot, which is normal for laptops, or is it stuttering, shutting down

[The Germ]

i ahve 700 mb of ram now

i have 1 256 stick and 1 512 i said i want to put a gig in eventually

it's stuttering when i add plugins to my audio

[dan the acid man]

i would say try adding another stick of memory, what plugins are you using.

your cpu should be ok, its pretty fast

[Barely Human]

Sounds like a cpu top out to me. I have a p4 3gig laptop with 512 ddr, and that only stutters when the cpu tops out.

Download cool beans system info from www.coolbeanssoftware.com and see what is topping out.

[Thegerm]

okay im not home right now but i will try that

I dont know i use an array of vst and vstis some huge ones some tiny ones...


but when it stutters out i press Cnt Alt Del and look at my task manager under performance and it shows the CPU going up to 100% when cubase is running.

Do you think this is a Ram issue?

[dan the acid man]

well if its saying 100% on your cpu then its your cpu then

[Thegerm]

yeah but is my cpu not good enough?

it's fast no?

P4 3.06 ghz

[Barely Human]

Even with the fastest cpu's, the amount of alorithms that need to be proccessed with even a few vst's and host programs is a hell of a strain. This cant be helped im afriad. Try and tweak your windows to get the best performance and then work round the problem -

ie - Dont use multiple reverb plug-ins when your using the same setting, put one on a send and use that instead

Bounce down any cpu heavy vsti tracks to audio..

Delete and Vst's that arnt in use

Dont use anything that you dont need to...

Hope this helps

[The Germ]

okay thanks

Do you think i need to switch to a desktop instead of the laptop im using

could that cure my problems?

[Barely Human]

Not really mate, there is only a few benefits really, and the only couple for performance issues are better soundcards and faster harddrives..

[G-whizz]

Not really mate, there is only a few benefits really, and the only couple for performance issues are better soundcards and faster harddrives..

extenal soundcards are better then internal desktop ones anyway !

[Mirsha]

There isn't any good reason why your laptop should be stutterning. I'm running a ghz Athlon 64 with 256mb of PC333 memory and I've had not a single problem running Reason and Ableton yet, everything is silky smooth.

You can always try reinstalling the main programs. If it's the vst's which are causing the problem then it could be the fault of vst's, they do eat up a bit more resources than normal then add to boot many of them aren't by professionals and you add in the possability of it being a badly coded vst going into an infinite loop and trying to turn your pc inside out.