Defragging each of your drives, particularly on an XP machine (which I assume yours is), is a really good suggestion.

Since your PC is on the borderline power-wise, you should look at not only the applications that are running, but also anything in the background. An easy way to check for the presence of offenders is to run the DPC Latency Checker (free tool, find by Google). Also, you can bring up Windows Task Manager and see if anything unusual is eating up CPU cycles.

Also, just for fun, run Geekbench (also find by Google) and report what your score is. We only have a few numbers so far.


BIAB 2025 Win Audiophile. Software: Studio One 7 Pro, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Roland Integra-7, Presonus 192 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.