Computer overwhelmed

I have a 3-4 yr old AMD computer. It had been handling Sonar 8.5 Producer well. However, I recently got into an ambitious project, with about 50 tracks. I have completley crashed a few times, and now I often get a small LCD near the center bottom of my screen at the same time playback or recording suddently stops.
My questions are: 1)since I have have about 524 of RAM, does anyone out there think upgrading to 2 RAM would help significantly. I know that when I now--very frequently-save my work, it takes about 40 seconds to do so. I don't want to waste money buying more RAM if I really need a faster computer.
2)Any other suggestions to run more efficiently. I have read about buffers, but I really don't understand it. I have moved my buffer bar from the far left to "2." There is also another buffer choice just above this, and I don't know what to do with that.
3)I have also stopped the meters of all of my tracks from showing--except the active track. I was thinking that my several V Vocal tracks should be mixed down. I am forced to turn off all of my effects because I think they take a lot of memory. However, I don't know if I'll be able to finally turn them all back on to upload my mix once I am thru editing.
Any suggestions. Thank you for your time.
Larry N

Thanks very much for your interest. Here are the answers to your questions:
While I look again at my computer screen, I can see--at the bottom of the screen in Track view--small green letters that say "Engine On." When my computer is overwhelmed, it stops, and something in red letters, such as "engine stopped," or something like that, appears. I guess it's not an LCD. When this occurs, it's not even so bad, since I can wait and click on that area, which then makes it disappear. My real fear is what happens other times, when the whole program just crashes.
2)My computer is a Compaq Presario, AMD Athlon 64 Processor 3500+. It's listed as being 984mHz, and 1.00GB of RAM. Yes, another mistake--I guess I had added some RAM memory to it about a year ago.
3)I am running XP
4)My sound card is a an M-Audio (Multichannel) Delta 66.
5)Hard drive: 225 GB is the capacity, of which 144GB is free: I'm can't seem to find out how fast the drive is; under device drivers, I believe the hard drive is listed under "Disc drive,", and it seems to be listed as "ST 3250825AS"   . I could not find anything about that when I googled it. If you tell me how I can find out how fast my hard drive is, I'll gladly try to find it. It was an off the shelf computer, so I assume it was what most computers were 4 years ago-though I realize that may not help.

Freezing is a great idea. I guess I should also "bounce to clip or track" all of my V Vocal clips.
The buffer question involved both the horizontal line that says "buffer size," as well as the item just above this that says "buffers in playback queue."
Thanks again.
Larry N

Freezing is a great idea. I guess I should also "bounce to clip or track" all of my V Vocal clips.

You just provided your own best answer to the question.
Adding RAM won't hurt anything and might help. To find out if it will, play that big project and watch your page faults (ctl-alt-del, Performance tab, watch the page file usage graph). If the "PF Usage" number keeps climbing, or gets up over half a gigabyte and stays there, that's an indication that you don't have enough RAM. Page faults are what happens when the system has to start using your disk drive as an extension to RAM, which slows everything down and can contribute to the dropouts you're experiencing. However, if your paging usage is low and stays low, then that's not your problem - you're simply overtaxing the CPU.

To lighten the load on the CPU, always bounce those V-Vocal clips as soon as you're done editing. Freeze any tracks that have CPU-intensive plugins on them. Hold off adding any effects on buses (especially mastering effects) until late in the project, when you're completely done tracking and tweaking tracks. Then raise your buffers to a high value, e.g. 2048 or 4096.

Another possibility is the dropouts are caused by a disk I/O bottleneck. If you have just one disk drive, consider adding a second one and dedicating it to audio files. Because your computer is aged (in computer years), you'll be pleasantly surprised by how much faster a newer disk drive will be, even if you don't go shopping specifically for a speedy one.

just FYI, your computer does have SATA if you have the drive that you mentioned above.  the link that I provided for your hard drive shows that your hard drive is SATA, so I don't know how many ports your motherboard has, but I suspect it would be more than 1.

Very good recommendations so far.  You'll do well to follow the advice. 

One thing about adding a SATA drive is that you should be able to use it when you upgrade your PC, so it's not a waste of money to buy one now.  HD's are fairly inexpensive, too. 

Unless you're running 64-bit XP, don't get more that 4gig of memory.  The 32-bit version will only be able to use 3.8gig.  More than that will work, but it is a waste of money.  Chance are that the DIMMs won't get used on a new motherboard in case you are planning an upgrade in the near future. 

Good luck,
Jan

Thank you all for your input.
The idea that even if I got another computer in the near future, I could just transfer this better hard drive to it, is an appealing thought.
Can anyone comment on this hard drive, which I saw on NewEgg:

Western Digital Caviar Black WD6401AALS 640GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive

You're right, it's only about $60.
 
Also, for the person who offered to sell me some more RAM, I would think the machine can only hold about 2 MEG of RAM, but doubling what I have might be helpful. I still have to try out what Bitflipper said, re: seeing if my project is using too much RAM. You said to post you (you, meaning JohnnyV,) so I assume that is different from writing in the place I am writing now. I'll look at "Message Options" to see if I can post you.

I'll also look inside my computer to see if it has another port. I assume by "port," one means the long rectangular opening into which one places something like a  "sound card." I'm not sure why I would need such a port, unless if, by buying this extra drive, I would have to put a "card" into this "port" to make the new drive work correctly. I guess I should also make sure I have an extra 'Bay," to make sure I have a place for this internal drive."
You may be shocked by this admission, but I don't really know much about computers!!
Thanks again.
Larry N

Open up the side of your computer and look for the model number of the Mother Board. It will most likely be an ASUS. See in this picture above the ASUS is the model. This will help us figure out if what type of RAM it can support. Compaq and most company's use different configurations. See if you have 2 or 4 slots for RAM Those are those long slots yellow and black lower right  are used in pairs. See those little blue ports near bottom? those are for SATA drives and they are marked as such. The long slots in the top left are PCIe and Video card slots. This picture is sort of 90 CW from normal view.

Hello,

Though, as you can see, I know little about computers, my impression from all of you that have been so generous in sharing their knowledge--is that even with more memory and a dedicated SATA drive, I still think my computer will be sluggish. I am therefore thinking of getting the following computer. I would greatly appreciate your feedback about my selection. If you think I should put it under the computer hardware section, I'll do that.
Thru a friend who is in the computer business--though not in computers for music applications--he can get me the following for about $500.
Processor: Intel Core i5-650M Processor (3.20GHz,4M cache) Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium Inspiron Desktop 580 MiniTower 1 TB SATA II Hard Drive (7200RPM) 6 GB DDR3 ECC SDRAM 1333MHz (3 DIMMs) 16X DVD +/- RW Optical Drive Any thoughts?

LarryN

That's not a bad pc spec Larry, but you should really consider adding at least one more internal hard drive, 2 would be better, so you can have one drive dedicated to the OS & Progs, 1 for your Cakewalk porojects, and the 3rd for all your sample libraries.

Hard drives being so cheap these days, I'd get a 500Gb for the OS and 2 x 1Tb for the other 2
 
If you do go down this route, make sure your psu can accomodate the extra power requirements

I did try what Bitflipper suggested, re: (ctl-alt-del, Performance tab, watch the page file usage graph). If the "PF Usage" number keeps climbing, or gets up over half a gigabyte and stays there, that's an indication that you don't have enough RAM.
When I did this, it did NOT go over the 500GB level. Thus, I believe I DO need a faster processor.
Thus, I think I will pass on the extra RAM, and spend my money on an Intel i5, as I have said. I'm still up in the air about the dedicated audio drive.
LarryN

Thanks for that info, JohnnyV.  I definitely get the back-up need.
On another subject, when I was mentioning to my computer guy that I would be putting a Delta 66 sound card into my new computer, he wondered if an approx. 10 year old sound card would be better than the standard sounds cards that come in today's computers--such as on a Dell i5. I could find out the exact sound card I am getting, unless you don't need that info to answer the question.
Thanks.
LarryN

Greetings bitflipper,
 
You are obviously wise beyond your years. I have a system question. I have Sonar 7 and have been using it fro basic recording through a Firepod. Recently I started dorking around with the soft synths and their great sequences. My 1G Pentium 4 (2.6 Gz) 6-year old Dell can't handle the soft synth/midi processing. I only use this PC for recording - it's never online and doesn't have any programs loaded except what's necessary to support Sonar.
 
I'm looking at an emachines compiuter with a dual core 3.1 Gz processor and 4 GB of ram. Would I be correct in assuming this should allow me to dork with as many midi files and soft synths as my heart desires?
 
Thanks. I'm not very bright about such things. According to the system requirments, my 1 GB/Pentium 4 should've worked.

LNovik


Thanks very much for your interest. Here are the answers to your questions:
While I look again at my computer screen, I can see--at the bottom of the screen in Track view--small green letters that say "Engine On." When my computer is overwhelmed, it stops, and something in red letters, such as "engine stopped," or something like that, appears. I guess it's not an LCD. When this occurs, it's not even so bad, since I can wait and click on that area, which then makes it disappear. My real fear is what happens other times, when the whole program just crashes.
2)My computer is a Compaq Presario, AMD Athlon 64 Processor 3500+. It's listed as being 984mHz, and 1.00GB of RAM. Yes, another mistake--I guess I had added some RAM memory to it about a year ago.
3)I am running XP
4)My sound card is a an M-Audio (Multichannel) Delta 66.
5)Hard drive: 225 GB is the capacity, of which 144GB is free: I'm can't seem to find out how fast the drive is; under device drivers, I believe the hard drive is listed under "Disc drive,", and it seems to be listed as "ST 3250825AS"   . I could not find anything about that when I googled it. If you tell me how I can find out how fast my hard drive is, I'll gladly try to find it. It was an off the shelf computer, so I assume it was what most computers were 4 years ago-though I realize that may not help.

Freezing is a great idea. I guess I should also "bounce to clip or track" all of my V Vocal clips.
The buffer question involved both the horizontal line that says "buffer size," as well as the item just above this that says "buffers in playback queue."
Thanks again.
Larry N

I'm short on time, not looking through the whole thread - but yes, LNovik, you're trying to work with an extremely under-powered machine.  1 gig of ram can hardly get you out of the gate anymore.  Even with 4 gigs, you'll still need to be bouncing down to audio (or freezing) every 5 or 6 tracks or so - There's no way you can expect all 50 to run in real time. --Side note - I still dream of the day when I can play all the tracks in my projects in real time.  You have to throw a lot more money at your system before you can do that.

And YES you must always bounce down your V Vocal clips - I don't do more than a measure at a time.

Randy B.