Suddenly I'm getting dropouts on all songs.

I'd suspect i'd done something on the song I've been working on but it does it on others that were fine too.
Task manager says I'm only using 20 % of my power. I've set buffers up and down.
Any other ideas?

It happened to me the yesterday...

Everything was running smoothly - then suddenly dropouts and clicks and hell.

Only to realise that Windows was downloading updates and wanted to install / restart.

I restarted and everything worked perfectly fine again. It was like the machine was suddenly bogged down with trying to finalise the update sort of thing.

So at the risk of sounding like your typical IT guy - have you tried restarting your system?

Have you introduced a bunch of effects? 

Is your audio recorded onto the same drive as your OS? This is not ideal. If you are doing that you should think about adding another HD for your audio. In any event you should defrag your HD and see if that helps. I would run Disk Clean-up before I defragged, too. Also, if you're maxing out your RAM, your computer will use HD space for virtual memory and this can cause drop-outs and such. Look in task manager the next time you have problems and see what your memory usage is. Also, it's a good idea to set the virtual memory to a static amount (2x RAM is a good amount, so 4 Gb for you, i.e. Min value = Max value= 4 Gb or more) rather than letting Windows do dynamic memory which will try to adjust on the fly and can cause problems with audio. One other thing that helped with XP in the past when you have a high end graphics card is to set the hardware acceleration down a notch or two. Hopefully these will help out.

I hope you backup is up to date. Might want to look at Windows Event logs.

if it started out of the blue on a stable system, it is because of something that was changed. Backtrack. It's usually something you (or some auto updater) has done. If not, the only explanation is a hardware problem. Remember microsoft isn't the only company that would love to be granted write access to your computer on a daily basis, i.e., auto updates. CHKDSK, MEMTEST and possibly SANDRA can help you with hardware diagnostics, the computer or mobo vendor probably has some as well. The event log is the place to start. Personally, I don't connect my DAW to the web, because it rules out a bunch of this stuff automatically when problems like this pop up.

  Turned off FX
I'm now worried my hard drive is slowing down (It's old) It's also making some new noises.

You might want to do a quick check of the drive. In My Computer or Explorer right click on the drive and select Properties. Select the Tools tab. Click on Check Now. Deselect "Automatically fix file system errors" (this usually forces it to prompt you if there is an error but you can leave it selected if you prefer) and select "Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors. It can take a while. This won't detect all physical problems but it will check to make sure there are no bad sectors which can cause read/write problems and really mess things up. Better to know in case you need to start backing things up. Apologies if you already know this.

It said "unable to check for errors" Or something like that.  Automatically fix file system errors was unchecked.
All C drive functions seem very slow so I'm thinking it's not Sonar and I'm now looking for a replacement computer ASAP.
I'll do a search here for the ideal specs to handle Sonar and my architectural program (Softplan).
I assume it will be a Windows 7 system.
Thanks so much guys
Glenn

Years ago with my trusty Sonar 4 my win XP computer I experienced a similar problem. That PC had two hard drives installed, so when I moved a song project onto the C drive it sputtered in a different manner
 
I was stumped, tried defrag and other utilities.

What I finally noticed was if I attempted to process a file through T Racks, the progress bar stumbled,

It was both hard drives that went crappy, they worked, but there write speed was not up to par

Lesson learned after that, in the drive bay, space the drives apart, if possible 

 

guitartrek


Could be that your reached your picture cache limit.  That would explain a sudden issue when everything else seems fine.  Have you checked this already?  Once you reach the limit your system will start choking.  You can bump up this parameter or delete picture files.

That'd be cheaper than a new system.

How do I check my picture cache limit?

I hear a new (HD accessing?) sound that goes 4 times "KKKK, KKKK, KKKK, KKKK" every 10 or 15 seconds.

That's the sound of a hard drive biting the dust. I hope you have a good backup. 

Or maybe just a new Hard Drive?  I buy a new computer every 3 years, but during those 3 years I almost always get a new hard drive half way through. 

You're probably right about the Hard Drive - but if you want to check the picture cache it is a under:

Preferences - Audio - Configuration File - and the property is PicCacheMB.  I bumped mine up to 2000.

I believe it is possible. I tell you what I did and maybe try it. I have 2 drives C and D. C was making a bad scraping sound but still working normally.

I got Acronis True Image and used it to clone the drive. I removed D and put a new fresh drive in there. I used the clone mode not the image mode to do this. In clone mode the new drive is slowly written with every bit of data from the C drive live in real time. Windows actually closes down before this starts and then reboots but not into Windows. Just after the bios,  Acronis runs and starts the cloning process. 

I then removed the faulty C drive and put the D drive (new C drive) into the normal C position and put my D audio drive back in. Everything worked flawlessly. I only had to re authorise two plug-ins on my system after doing this. One was Studio One and the other was my Korg Wavestation plug-in. Everything else worked without a hitch and nothing knew the process had taken place and everything just works perfectly now. Only I have a new and larger C drive.

Because this was so good and worked so well I believe it to be a far superior method of doing a total system backup especially if your OS gets messed up due to what ever reason and you have to revert back. I have never found system restore to be that great or reliable. Others seem to get it to work but it has never really worked for me. This works great.

It's happening tomorrow.
I got a SATA 7200 1T HD to replace the bad one and am adding a bit more RAM for good measure and having the IT guy do the cloning.
Thanks Guys, wish me luck. I miss my Sonar.

My IT son tells me it's a good idea too to hold off a year or so until Win 8 has proven itself and worked the bugs out.
Not looking fwd to reinstalling 15 years of programs and accumulated crap but it will be cleaner and probably run much much better.