I decided to dive in and modify my brand new Dell XPS 8900, and naturally, after fiddling too much I brought it to a crashing halt.


 
See, I needed to install a PCIe Firewire card into the computer as my Motu Ultralite MkIII was noisy and crackling when using it via USB. Yes, this PC has USB 3.0 and all that jazz, so maybe I had it coming... I should have known better. Connecting the Ultralite via the just installed Firewire card greatly reduced the crackling but didn't quite eliminate it completely.  Meanwhile, I noticed Sonar's performance meter would show CPU 1 at dangerously high level out after adding just a few Amplitubes and a  Ozone 5 to a project. Freezing midi tracks helped somewhat, but still, the performance meter was running high. I was a bit dismayed and wondered if I had false expectations of the new computer - an i7-6700 4Ghz ...running factory installed Windows 7.
 
I did mention I crashed the thing right? Short version - I played around in the bios and boom. No worries, I thought, I have a backup of all my projects. Tried running a System Recovery Disk - the damn thing loads but can't seem find the the drive I backed up to - which has a full system image. It just so happens that my backup is on a USB 3.0 drive... and the Windows 7 system recovery environment just doesn't include any USB 3.0 drivers. Tried loading the correct drivers from Dell for my model of computer, via the load driver option in the recovery environment - still a no go. Dell says these USB 3.0 drivers require a reboot - no can run time load. Desperation sets in... yep, I'm a gonna go get the Windows Deployment Toolkit and create a modified System Recovery Disk build. Hours later.....I made a few builds with the proper driver added in but still couldn't get USB 3.0 up and running.
 
Oh hell, I decided, why don't I just put Windows 10 on the PC. It's basically a freebie if you have a Windows 7 install disk laying around.  A check at Dell and it turns out that there are no factory install disks for my XPS 8900. Damn. Here goes...
 
Went to Microsoft and downloaded a bootable USB thumb drive version of a Windows 10 installation environment. I let it install off the memory stick - format the hard drive and let it all be damned...
 
Installed Sonar and and my plug-ins. Started playing around.
 
Wow. Massive audio performance increase in Sonar. Performance meters in Sonar barely registering anything. No noise, no crackle.... As much as I detest that flat-faced look of Windows 10, it sure seems to run smoothly. Still wondering why the factory installed Windows 7 had performance and noise issues....
 

The improvement in performance might have been due to wiping your system of all the crapware (TM) that Dell loads on their systems as opposed to just Win10.  Glad it worked out well for you though.

Although I never had Win 7, all the future versions of Windows have been very good and Win 10 being the best out of that lot. A good thing I suppose is that all my hardware (internal & external) have had good drivers for each Windows version, and that may have eliminated the majority of any conflict issues. 
 
Glad to hear Win 10 is working out and you've resolved this big headache.......you'll like the 'snappiness' of it.

Mesh
Although I never had Win 7, all the future versions of Windows have been very good and Win 10 being the best out of that lot. A good thing I suppose is that all my hardware (internal & external) have had good drivers for each Windows version, and that may have eliminated the majority of any conflict issues. 
 
Glad to hear Win 10 is working out and you've resolved this big headache.......you'll like the 'snappiness' of it.

Yes. My eyes are still blinking at the change in performance vs Windows 7.
 
Mesh: Normally I'd agree with you, as in the past vendors would load there systems down with junk. It wasn't quite the case here - the system was relatively free of of it. I'm really convinced the driver handling and the improved real-time performance in Windows 10 has something to do with it. Thanks.

You would think Windows 10 would handle multi Core CPU's better. 4 Cores, 8 threads or 6 cores. Every computer has a bunch now. No messing with core parking on W10 for me.

Welcome to the Windows 10 crowd. I made the jump on one 7 computer and one 8.1 computer. Truly the best move I ever made!

dwardzala
The improvement in performance might have been due to wiping your system of all the crapware (TM) that Dell loads on their systems as opposed to just Win10.  Glad it worked out well for you though.

This is the most probable explanation. You'd hope that the days of periodically wiping and re-installing Windows are behind us, but I doubt it.
 
I went from 8.0 to 8.1 to 10 on this machine, and haven't noticed any significant audio performance differences. The other day I dialed into a customer's computer for remote support, and was reminded all over again how much I hated 8.0 and its silly Metro UI.
 
As for your crackling problems, you need to find out what's competing for resources and kill it. Run LatencyMon. List all your background processes to find out what they are, what they do, and if they're necessary. For example, you don't need Windows to constantly index stuff or send usage reports to the mothership, and you definitely don't want Windows Update running when you're in a recording session.
 
If you're at the point where you're adding Ozone to the project, you are at a point where you can bump up the buffer size to a large value. This should avoid crackling, dropouts, clicks and pops. If it doesn't, you've got some hardware interrupt hogging the CPU.

bitflipper

dwardzala
The improvement in performance might have been due to wiping your system of all the crapware (TM) that Dell loads on their systems as opposed to just Win10.  Glad it worked out well for you though.

This is the most probable explanation. You'd hope that the days of periodically wiping and re-installing Windows are behind us, but I doubt it.
 

 
Not sure what the crap-ware might have been, since I did a thorough investigation. Oh - there was the 360mb install of WavesMaxx intended to run with the on-board Realtek audio controller. That sucker might have  had something to do with it. I suppose we;d only know for sure with a new, bog standard Windows 7 install - and that'll never happen. Thanks. 
 

My girlfriend has the Dell 8700 that she uses for her photography business. Lately she had been having all kinds of issues from the compute refusing to restart, refusing to read SD cards and most annoyingly, external harddrives randomly disconnecting and wouldn't reconnect until the system had been restarted. I'm pretty good with computers and I troubleshooted the hell out of it and could never get it working... Then the other day with 100% no user input, Microsoft installed Windows 10. Literally the computer was left on at night, we went to bed, woke up in the morning and the "All your files are in the same place you left them" screen was up (frozen no less). We panicked and freaked. We gave it some time in case it wasn't really frozen but it was, so I shut the power. Booted back up... and guess what? So far so good... Everything runs better than ever... all those issues are gone... and overall, everything is just great.
 
Still mad about the update happening on it's own, but it's good to know that some people have total success with Windows 10 haha.