Sorry for the delay in responding. I do maintenance work for a small reality company and it is usually part time, but we have a house that had terrific cigarette smoke damage and had to practically remodel it to get it ready for the next tenant. I was both too busy and too tired to write up a good reply. However I was able to implement all of the advice I had been given.

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The Situation At The Moment

is that the program is running fairly well now. I can get the RealDrums and the accompany RealTracks and the solo RealTrack all going. I am still having occasional problems. Sometimes the program will go all right for many minutes and then suddenly cpu usage will spike up to 100% and the audio will breakup and the controls freeze. Sometimes I can force this behavior by using various controls in the program. One of the worst is muting. Each instrument that I mute increases cpu usage and if I have enough instruments playing at once I can force breakup by muting 4 or 5 of them. Soloing also increases cpu usage. Sometimes just changing an instrument's volume or tone will cause the problem but that is rarer. But basically I will say that it now appears that the program will work with this computer. I am also using a demo of Forte DXi which uses a lot of processing. RealTracks works best for me when DXi is disabled, but I can use Forte DXi in combination with RealDrums which to me is the best of the real instruments that I have. There might still be some problems that I have not had time to explore. I am not yet sure that freezing tracks is working right, and rendering seems to take forever.

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What I Did

In addition to what I had listed in the first post in this thread, I made these changes.

> First I continued to free up hard drive space. I moved RealTracks & Drums to my backup drive. This seemed to make a positive difference.

> Rachel linked to a program to defrag the page files. It told me I only had 6 fragments but I used it anyway.

> Rachel suggested disabling paging. I tried that but saw no difference, so I tried the opposite and increased the page file size to 1800 MB, both for initial setting and maximum. That was the way I used to do it with a Cakewalk DAW when I had Windows 98 so I just thought I would try it. With RealTracks running, Task Manager is now showing that the computer is using substantially more PF than with the old settings. I don't know if that is good or bad.

> Mac suggested that I check that the hard drive is in DMA transfer mode. I had forgotten to mention in my initial post that I had done that. But I did check it again and it is still in DMA. To be thorough I ran the vbs script from winhlp.com anyway.

>Tony Wright suggested that I read his earlier thread on this same topic, which I did. On that other thread Jazzman suggested to " transfer all the BIAB on to" [another hard drive] "(leave the registry files behind)" [?] "and when it is working ok delete the BIAB on your onboard hard drive". So I did that. I had already transferred the RealTracks and Drums to the backup drive but now I have copied over all of the rest of the Biab folder and deleted it from the c drive.

And that's it. I am sorry that my time was too fragmented to be methodical in all of this, so I can't say which changes were the most beneficial.

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Thanks to all for the help

> Matt, you wrote, "I don't think the processor is the limiter, but that could be wrong." It's funny that the program can go a long time just fine at 50% or less cpu usage, then with no input from me the cpu usage jumps to 100% and it all stops working right. I can't figure out what is hijacking the processor, but I think if it were a better one there might be enough headroom to manage those events.

> Rachel, thanks for the link, the advice, and the comparison point.

> BarryKJ, just the thought of Windows auto updates makes me shudder.

> kelso, thanks for giving me another comparison point.

> Mac, Thank you for the advice. I had known about the DMA/PIO for a while. Here is an article I put together about noise in Dell laptops. The DMA transfer mode bit is in Section Two.
http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/laptop/f/3517/p/19142484/19265470.aspx#19265470

> Peter Gannon, thank you for the input. I appreciate that it was to the point in partially answering the specific question I asked in my initial post. It is most impressive that you take a personal interest in these discussions.

> Tony Wright, I wonder if you would have had better luck if you had turned off DXi while running RealTracks? It was interesting that Peter Gannon said that your Pentium 4 might be too slow "(and/or your hard drive speed)" . From what I read the P4's were better processors than many of those that Intel developed later. Interestingly, my Celeron is a Northbridge, basically a P4 with a smaller L2 cache.

> manning1, yes I had thought about a used desktop, but if I spent $270 on one then I would only have $30 left for the upgrade to Ultrapluspak. (I currently have the Pro version but just to evaluate the RealTracks ... I am not going to keep it ... either get it all or nothing). And I just just finished evaluating Forte DXi and have decided to buy it, so there goes 40 bucks. My plan at the moment is to get somebody to give me a used desktop, or maybe find one. I come across a lot of stuff at work.

You wrote: "...have you tried recording/playback from an external drive ?? ie not useing the win OS drive ??" Thanks for that suggestion. That seems to be basically what I am doing now (except for the recording part).

By the way, one of these days I need to update my article (link above) with a section on DPC latency. The thing is that it only affects audio on certain newer Dell laptops and for awhile Dell was working on a BIOS fix. I was waiting for them to finish that but now it appears that the intern who was doing the work has left for a paying job at Mac(Donald's).

Jim