I'm writing this on a windows laptop with a GB of Ram, early centrino processor and WinXP that's been awake for over a month. I never run virus software since it chokes the life out of your computer ... and only got bit once by a virus bad enough to have to reinstall when I stupidly opened a link I knew I shouldn't. It's all about where you go on the internet and what you download or open.

Whenever I think 'herky, jerky,'' I always thnk the soundcard buffer is set too low for whatever it's trying to do and is unable to keep those bytes flowing to the CPU. The fact that changing the instrument back to VSC cleared all the problems is pretty strong evidence to me that the computers fine ... and there was some parameter setting not working right with the forte.

BTW ... I'm with the kid. Reinstalling is the last thing I ever want to do given all that's loaded on my machines ... using disk imaging software like Acronis is another story. Just keep track of those restore points and every so often rewrite the backup disks after a lot of installs.

Something goes wrong with your computer? My experience is that it's about 5% a new install, 1% an actual hardware failure/ change and 94% you weren't paying attention to something you were doing and made some change you didn't intend.

This sounds like a 5% problem.

Prado