Must sonar 8 be run as an administrator?

I once had sonar 4 installed in a student lab at a college, and it was a pain to get to work properly. the IT people wouldnt let the users have full administrator privileges, and then sonar didnt want to run under the "student" accounet, so we found a fix that made them "virtual administrators" when they started sonar.. or something.

and now it is time to update the lab, so i am wondering if this will be any different with sonar 8, or if we have to try some clever fix this time as well :)

The official story from CW is that you have to be Administrator to install SONAR, but that you can run it with minimal user privileges. This is a prerequisite for advertising Vista compatibility.

This has not always been my experience, however. When I installed SONAR 5, I had to use RunAs and run it under Administrator credentials. Then I upgraded to SONAR 7 and there was no problem running as a limited-access user. Now I am at SONAR 8, and SONAR itself runs fine under a limited user account but Dimension Pro does not. I have to run as Administrator if I want to use Dim Pro.

So it's likely that SONAR will work fine for you in a student lab. I assume you wipe the disk clean between classes rather than trying to just clean them up, requiring that applications be re-installed. As long as you always install as Administrator, you should be OK. Not everyone has experienced the Dim Pro problem I'm having.

lovely :) the lab still runs windows XP so it looks like we will be fine.

every school in norway should have sonar within 2010, thats my goal, hehe.

ORIGINAL: Willy Jones [Cakewalk]

Hi Friends,

Starting with SONAR 6 or 6.2 the admin requirement is no longer necessary to run SONAR, and it plays much better with roaming profiles.

With Dimension Pro, the admin issue is mainly affecting x64 users. If you're running x64 in your lab then you will need to use Option #2 in the workarounds explained here:
http://www.cakewalk.com/support/kb/kb20081008.asp as limited users won't even have the 'Run as Admin' option available to them.

With Dimension Pro, the admin issue is mainly affecting x64 users. If you're running x64 in your lab then you will need to use Option #2 in the workarounds explained here:
http://www.cakewalk.com/support/kb/kb20081008.asp as limited users won't even have the 'Run as Admin' option available to them.

Great tip but my Compatibility Checkbox is greyed out? Any Idea Willy?

Vista is not the optimal OS to run Audio Sequencing on from my experience. I've been running Sonar since it's inception & on my Quad w/Vista it does not run nearly as close to it's potential when I run the same on my XP machine... While I'm no expert someone like "Jim Roseberry" at Studiocat or Scott at ADK can elaborate. All I can confirm is that there is a very clear Speed/Stability loss using Vista... That's not to say some like the flow of Vista but I'm much happier on the XP as I don't believe Vista was really ready for , "Prime Time"..... JMHO Wildman

Get Vista! You'll love it.

My personal experience is that Sonar crashes a lot if you run as admin. I don't know why. I saw this with S7 running on both XP and Vista (I used a non-admin account on XP). When I got my new Vista machine, I installed Sonar and initially always ran it as admin. But I had these weird unexplained crashes - sometimes when opening a project, sometimes when closing Sonar, sometimes just in the middle of doing some random operation. Then I remembered that I had the same issue with XP and that not running as admin fixed it. So I tried it with S7 on Vista and the crashing mysteriously went away.

I have since installed S8 and it still seems stable. I have feeling if I run it as admin the crashing would start again.

SilkTone

ORIGINAL: SilkTone
My personal experience is that Sonar crashes a lot if you run as admin. I don't know why.

Having Administrator privileges means you have many more ways to spectacularly mess up the operating system to a point where it will crash. A misbehaving program run by a mere mortal will usually crash with an error without bringing the operating system down.