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It's not always what you think


Paul Cantillon

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I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone at BandLab for taking over Cakewalk and keeping it alive, I can’t adequately express how important having a reliable DAW is to many of us.

Had a great time over the holiday period recording in Cakewalk (I still want to call it Sonar, but I'll get the hang of it eventually - after all, I got used to calling it Sonar when it went from Cakewalk), and I was marvelling at how my new 64GB of ram was allowing my super dooper computer to handle apparently anything I threw at it, when the unthinkable happened - Audio Dropouts! Ahhg. not again, not since Windows 98 had I experienced the frustration of having "something nasty" happen.  I quickly fired off a request to support and Kris was very prompt in replying with a related post from the old forum, but I had already tried all of the things latency & buffer related.

Something clearly wasn't right - privately I was seething that someone, somewhere had probably released something that hadn't been tested enough, or fixed something that wasn't broken or Windows had updated something I didn't want updating or use.....etc etc

Hankering to "go back to a time when life was good", I found an old 2018 version of the project I created (Yep. it takes me that long to get around to things) and loaded up the last version of Sonar - and experienced the same audio drop outs - but how could that be ? Obviously, I blamed software again, probably  Windows this time.  "Windows" I discovered, was throttling my CPU! How dare it! I'm in charge, not silicon.  

Despondent, I started having.... illicit MAC thoughts, nostalgic dreams of when hardware warmed my room and a time when desk space was non existent because there was a bloody great mixing desk taking it all up......

I was about to remove half my memory when I noticed how warm it was in the case - in fact the CPU was almost red hot... and wait a minute - there was a static air bubble in my water cooler! Obviously, the pump had failed after all these years (it's an antique Zalman reserator from the days of Windows 98) - it's incredible the thing didn't burst into flames - I was surprised the PC worked at all.

Here's the thing, though, nothing had broken or failed or been released after insufficient testing - all I had done was move my PC back an INCH (that's 2.54cm), which had caused a kink in the external tubing that cools my PC, rendering it useless.  An inch that created a week of frustration & internal struggle, blaming all sorts of people I would never meet.

And it was all my fault for wanting to line up the PC with the front of my desk.  Never again am I going to move anything.

 

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I work for an IT consulting firm.  Welcome to my world!

Fortunately, you figured out fairly quick that it's always a process of elimination and that the usual suspects are not always the ones to blame.  A cable starting to give out is one of the hardest to nail down by the way!

Welcome to the Coffee House!  Feel free to grab a cookie or two.  The restroom is down the hall, but it's locked and we've never been able to find the key...

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Fluid cooling obviously offers failure modes in addition to leaking. Red hot CPU's raise serious questions about the motherboard thermal alarm and automatic shut-down features. Are these fully active and set to kick in above the rated temperatures of the CPU? The point of using water coolers is so that you can overclock without cooking the CPU, but disabling thermal protection is rarely a wise idea. 

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