hardware errors - do I need a dedicated computer?

[Astro]

Hi folks,

I have been using Giga 160 and Sonar2 for a while now and I have a recurring problem that I am wondering if others have had. Frequently, when loading a gig file, my system will freeze up and I have no choice but to kill the process in XP\'s task manager. Very often after doing this, when I go to close down I get one of Windows\' lovely \"blue death\" screens telling me that a process locked up and then it does a physical memory dump.

I have set up my system according to all suggestions. I have three 7200rpm hard drives (one for system stuff, one for gig files, one for audio files). It is a PIII 1GHz machine with 700MB of RAM. It should work fine, but now the folks at Tascam are telling me I should run Giga160 on a dedicated machine.

Is this true? I know it would be great, but the last thing I can afford to do after recently spending several thousand bucks on software is go out and build a new machine.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,
Mike

[Bill]

Sometime instruments “stall” for a while when loading, but eventually finish. Have you tried letting the system sit when this happens?

Sonar and Giga usually get along well, and you should have no trouble using them on the same system. Using Giga on a separate system would give you more performance, i.e. more voices, more FX, more audio tracks, etc.

[Astro]

Bill,

Thanks for your reply. When you say \"stall\" how much time are we talking about? I have waited sometimes for 30 seconds and it will eventually loaded, but I have also waited for a few minutes with nothing happening. How much is the longest time you\'ve ever seen for a successful load?

Thanks,
Mike

[Bill]

Maybe as long as five minutes on a couple of occasions. I haven’t had much trouble lately, with the 2.54 update.

[Simon Ravn]

Five minutes?!? Is that yet another one of those good reasons to run GS on WinXP? images/icons/wink.gif