The story of my life. I have to do my accounts and payroll on Sundays and it's really quite extraordinary. One minute I'll be sat on my laptop seat methodically preparing invoices, and then the next - without any idea of how I got there - I'll be sat in my desktop seat watching an old Sesame Street sketch on YouTube. 

About a year ago I switched to MSE from McAfee, which had been an operational headache from day one. MSE has
been quietly doing its job, but I occasionally check it with a run of Malwarebytes. Never any problems with it missing something. But as soon as I made the switch, I started getting bad pool header blue screens when starting SONAR, following an exit from any browser; most commonly from IE. I had two brands of ram with slightly different tRAS
timings so I changed those over. I still got blue screens, but only after exiting IE. As soon as I turned off MSE
scanning following a browser session, the blue screens stopped.

sharke
Realistically there's all sorts of stuff going on in the background in Windows - if Sonar needed 100% of the CPU then it just wouldn't work at all. 

I have specified that MSE doesn't scan the cakewalk folders etc, but there are definitely times when my hard drive gets used heavily by svchost.exe.
 
Edit: Removed paranoid stuff about Microsoft
 
There are valid reasons for svchost to burn up the drives for 1/2 hour, but there are lots of reasons that really aren't valid too. I don't trust it.

sharke
I've never turned MSE off and I haven't seen it cause any problems in the way of corruption or clicks and pops. I have all of my Sonar and project folders excluded from protection though. Realistically there's all sorts of stuff going on in the background in Windows - if Sonar needed 100% of the CPU then it just wouldn't work at all. 

+1.
 

gswitz
There are valid reasons for svchost to burn up the drives for 1/2 hour, but there are lots of reasons that really aren't valid too. I don't trust it.

Configuration get past this. Exclude folders and stop scheduled scans. Look at the tasks in task manager. Stop unnecessary services, get run of unnecessary crap in startup. Use the file monitoring facilities and process monitoring of Process Explorer to see what is really going on. Don't install stuff that you are never going to use in a DAW environment (i.e. if you want Skype go dual boot). use performance monitor, get rid of MS media player, etc etc...
 
But keep the important stuff... that's what your high powered CPU is for. Sonar is unlikely to need all of it. Your OS is just as important as Sonar.
 
Cheers...

Alex, I guess that's the point. You can't get a DAW build of Windows. There is no Windows equivalent of Ubuntu Studio. That's really what we need imho.

Bottom line is to be aware of what is running, make sure you keep your system protected, and be mindful of accumulated extra crap that runs needlessly and chews up resources while you are running Sonar.
 
Bob Bone
 

Just a follow up I am running ZoneAlarm and Malwarebytes Premium reasonably successfully side by side now.
I put in similar file/folder exclusions for both ZoneAlarm and Malwarebytes see #7.
 
I also need to exclude processes so that neither application would conflict from one another, it also speeded things up:
 
So in the case of ZoneAlarm I excluded the processes:
C:\Program Files\Cakewalk\SONAR X3 Producer\SONARPDR.exe
C:\Program Files (x86)\Malwarebytes Anti-Malware\mbam.exe
C:\Program Files (x86)\Malwarebytes Anti-Malware\mbamscheduler.exe
C:\Program Files (x86)\Malwarebytes Anti-Malware\mbamservice.exe

And in the case of Malwarebytes:
C:\Program Files\Cakewalk\SONAR X3 Producer\SONARPDR.exe
C:\Program Files (x86)\CheckPoint\ZoneAlarm\ThreatEmulation.exe
C:\Program Files (x86)\CheckPoint\ZoneAlarm\vsmon.exe
C:\Program Files (x86)\CheckPoint\ZoneAlarm\ZAPrivacyService.exe
C:\Program Files (x86)\CheckPoint\AKL\AkSA.exe
C:\Program Files (x86)\CheckPoint\AKL\AkSVC.exe
C:\Program Files (x86)\CheckPoint\AntiTheft\Antitheft.exe
C:\Program Files (x86)\CheckPoint\ZoneAlarm\ZATray.exe

 
Might be helpful to others... (adapt with your chosen virus scanner/malware scanner).
Cheers

When I'm in heavy sequencing mode, I turn off all extra services. I have 8GB of memory and I don't want anything to hinder that.