Thanks again for all the responses, it took me a while to go through everything and follow down all the leads. First a little background: My old DAW started life in 2001 or so and around 2006 I upgraded the mobo, chip, memory, and power supply. A while later the hard drive died and I was pressed for time so I took it somewhere and had them throw a new one in for me. I knew it was ancient and was a little glitchy but I was happy with it, at least until XP fell out of favor.

A while back I got the idea to look online at buying Windows 7 and soon found I could get a refurbished office PC with the OS already installed for not much more money so I did that ($119).

Here's some info on it:
Dell Optiplex 745
Windows 7 Home Premium Service Pack 1
Intel Pentium D 3.40 Ghz
2GB RAM
32 bit system

Windows Experience Index base score 3.3,
(however I expect that score to go up when my new graphics card arrives and I can go back to dual monitors. All my other scores are in the 5's.)

I turned on Resource Monitor and ran through all the sluggish processes I already described, again, and observed and took notes. With BiaB in DAW mode, it uses a lot of CPU power to drag into Sonar, then drops off once it is loading in there.

When I open a BiaB song in RB it takes two to three times as long to regenerate and again it is the CPU that is maxed out. At no time did it seem like memory was the problem. The system seems to idle at around 765 Mb , BiaB uses about 90 MB additional and RB uses about 140 MB additional just idling. During hard usage, I never saw memory go up more than a couple hundred more, or 60% of available memory, at any time.

I did remember to uncheck the "speed up generation of real tracks" and it made a tiny difference but not too noticeable. Then again my songs are pretty basic, three or four straight chords repeating over and over.

Now the best part: when I installed the software, I did the minimum install and continued to run BiaB and RB off the external hard drive supplied by PG Music. On the old box I had more HD space so I installed it there. But now it's USB 2.0, the cable they supplied splits into two and goes into 2 USB ports on the back of the box.

So there you have it. I think once I get back to dual monitors I'll be a happy camper. Here's a little info from Dell that might help explore different hard drive options. My current one is only 70GB. Guess I should have looked harder at that. Now I wonder exactly what was in the old box....maybe I can slap that in the new one. I'll go dig it out. I think it was a lot bigger.

Thanks again everybody!

HARD DRIVE OPTIONS

Supported Types Serial ATA or Serial ATA 3.0

Available Drives 7200RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s: 80GB, 160GB, 250GB4 7200RPM

10K RPM SATA 1.5Gb/s: 80GB

SMART Technology SMART III

Burst Transfer Rate 300 Mbit/s

Partition Support MS Windows XP Professional SP2: Support both FAT16 and FAT32. FAT32 will be the default configuration

MS Windows XP Home SP2: Support both FAT16 a

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