Thanks for the response, Jim. Well, I've started working my way through a couple of tutorials. I may try out the one you suggest too.

But right now I'm struggling with other things. You know, it's all coming back to me now. When I bought the 2014 version, I discovered that my laptop wasn't up to the task. I was getting pops and crackles and drop-outs. It was somewhat slow, with a 1.7 gig processor and only 2 gigs of RAM (with no possibility for increasing RAM capacity). So I bought the one I have now, which has a 2.8gig Core 2 Duo processor and 8 gigs of RAM, plus I'm running a 64 bit OS (still Win7) on this machine.

But shortly after I bought this machine, a couple of things happened. 1) we moved to a new house, and it was a major move that took a long time and a long time to recover from (we'd lived at our last house for 16 years), and somewhere in all the chaos, BiaB fell by the wayside. 2) My desktop DAW's hard drive crashed during the move (I dropped it, POS Seagate!) and I lost everything on that 2TB drive, including my BiaB setup and all the other music software I had installed. I still haven't given up hope of recovering something off that drive, but the desktop sits in a room piled high with boxes full of stuff that I don't know where is gonna go. I have a new 3TB drive for it, but I haven't bothered to reinstall the OS yet.

So anyway, I'm dependent on this current laptop, which, with a 5.9 ratng on the "Windows Experience Index," should be more than capable of handling anything BiaB can toss at it, especially since it handles Cakewalk's Sonar Platinum and Studio One v3 without so much as a hiccup.

But what do I get when I open up BiaB and set the screen to notation mode? Pops, crackles, and drop outs. Say what!? OK, so the song I was trying to play was pure MIDI, so I go and take a look in preferences at the MIDI settings. They all looked good to me. So, to reduce overhead, I closed all other programs. This helped a lot, but there was still the occasional pop, crackle, or drop out. They were most likely to occur when the music reel reloaded the screen with four more measures. A curious thing began to happen, though. The longer I let the tune play, the fewer glitches occurred. It was almost as if BiaB was healing itself. Well, fine, I think. As long as it stays healed. But there's the rub. It doesn't. When I load a new tune, I have to go through this mess all over again.

I can't afford another laptop --and I feel that this one should be able to handle BiaB anyway. I'm gonna find a tool that will help me clean out the registry of junk, which I'm sure there's a lot of. And I'm currently in the process of offloading a bunch of files just so I can continue with installing the rest of BiaB. Frankly, I'm stunned that I'm having to come up with another 170+ gigs of space (that's what the BiaB installer is telling me I need). I've never in my life dealt with another computer program of any sort that required that much disk space for a full install. Even the Win7 OS doesn't require that much space!

So anyway, if this problem continues, then I guess I'll have to get busy setting up and configuring the DAW again. And turn my back on the POS 2 TB Seagate. And hope I don't have the same problems with it!