Yikes.


I never thought of it that way.

Interesting point there Bub.  I used to have (at least) three PC's - one dedicated to serious gaming, one dedicated to not-so-serious music mangling creation and one for everything else (work, email, internet surfing, etc.).  But now I only have one and I've been avoiding both gaming and music creation for the moment.

That said, you'd think things would be advanced enough to allow for doing all those things well...

sharke


I must be lucky because in over a decade of using Windows I have never experienced a single problem from a Windows update. Having said that, is it not possible for the developers of a program like Sonar to assess whether or not new Windows updates could potentially affect the use of their software? After all they should at least be aware of any potential dependency issues with the things Windows Update is changing. 

FWIW, this kind of thing sometimes happen even in Apple land - an update to the OS can cause issues w/ Logic - so that's an Apple app, running on Apple hardware, under an Apple OS.


Usually, a patch is quickly released, but still - shows that there's no way way for developers to tell beforehand.

I remember one upgrade Apple did that broke Photoshop for 2 years.


Me and the other artist that runs Windows got a big laugh out of that.
 

mike_mccue


I remember one upgrade Apple did that broke Photoshop for 2 years.


Me and the other artist that runs Windows got a big laugh out of that.

You actually thought it was something to laugh at? 

craigb

Interesting point there Bub.  I used to have (at least) three PC's - one dedicated to serious gaming, one dedicated to not-so-serious music mangling creation and one for everything else (work, email, internet surfing, etc.).  But now I only have one and I've been avoiding both gaming and music creation for the moment.

That said, you'd think things would be advanced enough to allow for doing all those things well...

They are.


You can easily play Hi Def games, run Open Office.org, stream movies, and run Reaper all on the same PC. Not to mention video editing.


Times have changed ... but not all the vendors are keeping up with the times.

Wow... I just signed on. I've been at UGA to a conference all week. I saw 14 updates. One Defender, the rest sevurity updates ... I've never had a problem with them... so I clicked download and while I was reading your OP my browser froze. I stopped the download and it immediately started working again.
I may give it another try, nothing had installed yet, it was just downloading but it spooked me so I stopped it. I'll be sure to set a restore point and do a backup first.
 
Julien

Sorry to hear about your problems! 

My wife and I have 2 Desktops we share; 
1) Studio DAW, Photoshop and Video. No Internet connection unless I 'must' activate software.  And all incoming content such as updates, audio, video and photos are all scanned thoroughly prior to transfer. 

2) Internet.... 
Since my wife does a lot of cyber-networking with friends and family; E-mails and sharing of photos on a regular basis (daily; morning, noon and night) on average; every month or so I find and remove viruses, most of these viruses are fairly harmless low-risk but still I don't like any of that crap and usually catch them before they cause instability. Another security measure; after each session the cache gets cleaned out and she also uses CClean. 

That said; no matter how cautious, no matter how updated the AV and several other security apps are the risks of catching a virus is still quite real. 

Updates: Windows, AV, Malwarebyte, Spotbot and CClean updates; on both computers I have it set to; Manually, I much prefer to check for updates at least once a week and usually install only important security updates for example; I prefer to stick with my own choice of audio/video players and IE never gets used.  I hate having the above mentioned security programs and such running in the background. Also because my wife's PC can get bogged down easily; it's not a particularly powerful system.   

I also run scans when 'I' want and do so frequently about twice a week or more; should I suspect something isn't quite right for example; Adware can diminish performance and adverts appearing on sites that normally should not be there; these are all signs of likely infection. 

It's not that computers have advanced so much; are way more powerful nowadays; that I can play games; Halo and Sim City all whilst chatting on Skype; all whilst posting feveriously on forums; all whilst doing a critical mixdown of 120 tracks with 5,000 plugins (sorry, a little overly exaggerated there lol) it's because I don't feel the need to push systems so fricken hard and take security risks. I mean seriously; my system would literally be SMOKING; it probably go up in flames! 

Two years ago, I only owned 1 computer. It was the DAW, internet gizmo and all-around-do-everything machine. Sometimes an update would cause my I/O settins to change, or I'd 'lose' the interface connection, but never anything more serious than that.
And I never wanted anything more serious than that to happen, so I bought a cheap computer for the internet and disconnected the DAW from the world.
 

wow,  didn't know this would open up such a lot of comments but I've enjoyed hearing from all of you.  Guess it IS a subject near and dear to us all - how to better protect our DAW setup.  Well, my own setup is that I have and use 3 separate notebook computers, so my DAW is dedicated to just THAT - recording projects.  But partly because some apps want internet connection to register, I left it on wireless network capability and kept up faithfully with the AV and Windows updates and patches.....  at this point I just will not bother to DO that anymore.   I have in mind to run a weekly AV scan with ann updated program I can use off a memory stick to at least keep safe the files I do have to xfer on and off.... but other than that, I'm going to really insulate this DAW from here on out.

Interestingly, I wasted abou 2 hours again last night with a system restore back to 1 Jan, unload and reload of my Edirol USB 64x driver, blocked all internet access and updates from coming back in, and totally reinstalled Sonar X1 over-top my existing  install.   Result?   Soon as I brought up a Project, and tried to work with a track or even just import a .wav into a new audio track, Sonar crashed with the main .exe stopped working error, forcing me to go to Task Mgr to end it, as I otherwise had no keyboard or mouse working.   So I can't even imagine what really happened that all this couldn't resolve,  but as of tonight I have an appointment with my Windows OS restore DVD, every single Sonar and soft synth DVD, and just tons of fun.   Restoring all my project files is the easiest part, as they're always backed up on an external USB drive.  But sheesh.   What crap to go through.   Thanks again for your input, everyone!    Cheers!      - John