For various reasons, I'd not been in the studio for a couple of months but decided yesterday to carry on working on a few things.
 
So after switching everything on I was greeted by an error screen generated by the BIOS indicating that all was not well. No attempt at getting it to boot properly worked and in desperation, I replaced the keyboard batteries. It worked!!
Same thing followed with the mouse but I finally got to my desktop
 
launched CdB only to be informed I was running in Demo mode. I've never seen that before so decided to take the plunge and update to the latest version.
 
Bandlab assistant wouldn't run, just got the outline shell of the gui with a grey background and ghosted out options.
 
So I downloaded the latest version from the Bandlab website and the only way I could get it to install was by running it As Administrator
 
But it installed successfully, so did the CdB update.
 
So after a good couple of hours I was finally able to do some work
 
Wrapped everything up at the end and decided to bun a new CD for the car. Created the necessary files in CD Architect, popped a blank cdr in the drive and was greeted by a horrible grinding, clunking noise from the drive so it looks like that's shot as well.
 
I'm not sure if there is a moral to this story other than, even if you don't plan on using your daw for a while, it's probably a good idea to at least power it up/down once in a while.

Bristol_Jonesey
 
... it's probably a good idea to at least power it up/down once in a while.

 
It certainly seems true that keeping electronic equipment in frequent use helps to prolong its life. Televisions are the worst things for failing, usually just after you've been away on holiday. I suspect that many failures are due to moisture in the air which can easily condense on the components if the temperature drops low enough. I keep a couple of rack units switched on overnight in the cold season and hopefully the heat transfers to other nearby units. On very cold nights I sometimes leave a computer on too.

Remove your dvd drive, open it up, and see if the door/drive belt broke, or is so stretched out it doesn't turn the wheels.

I'm sending it back to Carillon. They can do it.
 
They are also going to install another SSD with Win 10 Pro on it in a dual boot config while I sort out moving all my software across, or at least re-authorise my plugins.