Hi everyone,
 
For about a month or so I've been getting the "High CPU Usage" warning from Norton on 2 different laptops. Mostly for Internet Explorer which can be as high as 75% but also for Sonar and other programs.
 

My systems:
1. AMD Turon; 2GB ram; 300GB hard drive; WinXP sp3
2. Intel i7 2.2Ghz; 8GB ram; 338GB hard drive; Win7
 
Any ideas as to why this is so?
 
Steve

For sonar and if its causing a problem, the just raise your ASIO Buffers or WDM Slider. The higher those settings, the lower the CPU usage.

As far as Norton goes, so what!. For sonar, you go by the CPU meters in Sonar and you can go into your task manager and view those meters for your PC usage.

Also, Sonar projects are not all the same, so the more stuff you have in a project, the more CPU it will use. just like a car, the faster you go, the more gas you consume..

Also, Your sound card and its drivers play a huge huge in Performance

Cj

im getting extremely high CPU usage in task manager when i open sonar. no project open. just the home screen. getting about 42 percent and then when i set the buffer size to any buffer different than what it was previously set at the cpu goes up to like 90 percent. this is crazy because CPU usage is at like 4 percent in protools and cubase. im using the rednet pcie card as an interface. great low latency but sonar tends to melt down with it... :(

I don't remember posting this and don't remember the solution. Currently using Windows 10 with no CPU issues. Not using Norton either.

Willing to bet the solution was removing a virus called Norton.
HTH.
: )

jimoliver
im getting extremely high CPU usage in task manager when i open sonar. no project open. just the home screen. getting about 42 percent and then when i set the buffer size to any buffer different than what it was previously set at the cpu goes up to like 90 percent. this is crazy because CPU usage is at like 4 percent in protools and cubase. im using the rednet pcie card as an interface. great low latency but sonar tends to melt down with it... :(

Unless your problem also revolves around Norton - you should probably start a new thread. How similar are the projects (Sonar versus PT versus Cubase)? Would look at plugins that are different between them. You say nothing loaded? What driver mode - is it ASIO4All?

I can't speak to the Norton issue since I use an offline machine.  Wanted to take my machine, cut out all the needless windows processes, and certainly wanted NO virus software acting as a processing gate guard and slowing things down.
 
So, I did all that on my Windows 7 Home Premium (straight out of the box system) on an i7-970 machine with 8GB RAM.....
 
But I was seeing high CPU usage still, and more worrisome, insanely high memory usage (5BG reserved for hardware).
 
TLDR: went to the MSI (my motherboard) site and looked up the latest BIOS version.  Flashed my machine (knuckle biter! & success!)) with the new BIOS, and now I'm down to 15MB of RAM reserved for hardware (99% reduction of RAM allocation).  Yippee.
 
Guessing this issue (RAM Hardware mis-allocation) was causing high CPU demand from lots of disk caching, but I could be wrong.
 
Anyway, for what it is worth, all is well now, and the super heavy VST loading instruments I am using now load and run like a champ.
 
Cheers,
Jim