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?

What soundcard do you have, and are you using ASIO or WDM drivers ?

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? 

ASIO
I'm using my BR800 as the sound card.
Thing is, everything was fine for the longest time and now suddenly the dropouts. I can only play about 30 seconds.

I also suspected the update and I turned off the auto update and set my system back to last Friday.
No change.


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

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.

M_Glenn_M


ASIO
I'm using my BR800 as the sound card.
Thing is, everything was fine for the longest time and now suddenly the dropouts. I can only play about 30 seconds.

I also suspected the update and I turned off the auto update and set my system back to last Friday.
No change.


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.

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

Thanks guys.
I'll do some extra backups rt away.
My projects are on a different HD than the rest.
I'll move them to a newer, faster drive just in case.
I have defragged all drives just last week but I'll try the system errors thing and set the virtual memory etc per advice.
Worrisome is the change from a previously stable setup.
I'll let you all know
many thanks.

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.

Also, your AV program could be a culprit if you run one there - they autoupdate daily, including the executables sometimes.