Paddy

Guys - thanks very much. Ryzen chip may be the problem. Probably more likely is the Realtek soundcard. I'm going to get an external soundcard and see if that clears things up. Really appreciate your time.

Hello everyone - this is my first post. Pleased to meet you all. I was hoping something with more experience could tell me why my laptop is performing so badly while running Cakewalk. It's an HP laptop with good specs - Ryzen 7/16gb/512. On paper it should cope really well with music production. But... Cakewalk crashes constantly. Latency while recording live audio tracks (guitar/voice) is almost unusably bad. It doesn't even run VSTs well. Should I just admit defeat and get a Mac? Would using an external audio card improve things? Are there basic setup things that I'm missing? Would be really grateful for your advice. Many thanks.