Scrolling Screen or moving across multiple tracks killing CPU & causing "skipping" or drop

Sonar X1 (X1b Build 246)
Presonus FireStudio 26x26 with latest drivers
Intel Core Duo 2160 @1.80ghz
Sata 7200 RPM Drive with plenty of space
 
This also did it with my Event One Gina 24 that I just replaced. I was actually hoping it would go away withe interface change but not so.
 
If playing back a song with even just a few tracks and I scroll the screen (mouse wheel up and down) and sometimes just the playback itself is causing some dropout or sputtering. The CPU Meters in Sonar are barely moving but if I open up Task Manager in some cases it shoots up into the 90's and even pegged at 99 on more then one occasion.
 
I have shut down just about everything else. I never use to have this problem. I have killed all ProChannel processing, all effects, routed tracks to different buses and different outputs, removed volume and pan envelopes, removed any MIDI tracks, but nothing seems to really help. I am not sure but believe it started with one of the fix files.
 
I did a quick search for scrolling issues but did not find any. Is anyone else having this problem, have other suggestions, or is it just me.
 
Thanks,
 
Joe..
 

Sounds like the video driver is messing with your DPC latency. I would run DPC Latency Checker, and see what it shows when you scroll in SONAR. Unless your video card has less than 250MB RAM, Aero shouldn't be causing any problems, and should help in most cases.

I don't usually worry too much about underpowered processors, but that E2160 is getting pretty long in the tooth, and was not state of the art at the time it was released. Calling it a "Duo"" is not accurate, as my understanding is it's not Core 2 architecture, but the older Pentium "Dual Core". I don't think it meets the minimum requirements for X1, and would guess it barely makes the grade for Win7. Might be time to start thinking about a new PC.

I Agree its time to drop another CPU in there, go 64bit and 8gb memory.

With the checker current latency was all over the map. It says it "should be" able to handle streaming audio.

Test Interval 976
Current: Anywhere from 175-1212 with an average about 500+/-
Absolute Maximum: After resetting at 847 but it hit 1212 once.

Downloaded and installed new Video drivers. That didn't do it.

But!

I had some unused Softsynths in this particular song that were used for trying a few things but I never deleted them. I also had several MIDI keyboard tracks. I Deleted the Unused Softsynths which cleared it right up (why I dunno). I then bounced the midi tracks to audio tracks and Archived the MIDI tracks and it is working perfectly.

I'm going to upgrade the CPU, Memory, and Hard drive but in the meantime I think this is a workable solution for me.

Thanks for all the help.

Joe..

I have playback buffers at only 2.
Driver bit depth 24
Sampling rate 96k
64 Bit precision on
Buffer size 10.1msec\972 samples

I am open to suggestions to try. I will bump up the buffers to begin with.

I keep my latency at 5ms. usually 2 something when playing realtime like guitar rig.

Ah, I see. I wasn't even aware of that configuration before now. Looks like I need to learn more about the midi engine :)

yeah i didn't really know it was there till I read about it in X1 power.  Learned a ton of stuff I never knew about before from that book. If you notice midi missing notes and such raising this usually helps.  I also raise this during mixdown on projects with lots of soft synths out of habit now.