Just updated my mobo, CPU & memory; REAPER locks up my system

Reaper 2.58 locks up my system when I'm playing back an existing project. Only pressing the reset button on my computer gets me out of that state. Here's the details, as I've just updated my mobo, CPU, & memory and fresh-installed XP, maybe I have something set wrong: Hardware: Intel Core2 Quad Q6600 on a Gigabyte EP45-UD3P motherboard with Intel P45 chipset, 4G of RAM. 2 SATA drives for media, 1 ATA100 drive for system. 2 Echo Layla 24/96 PCI sound cards, Echo ASIO 7.3 driver. OS: Windows XP Professional service pack 2. Project is around 30-some tracks, WAV, 48kHz, only REAPER-bundled plugins used, no MIDI used. Split to stems into the 16 available Layla outputs for mixing in a console. CPU not running hot. Bad memory? How to test some things: tips?

Thanks. Will try that.

Some thoughts: a) does the PC lock up when you use other applications (MS Word, WMP, etc)? b) does Reaper lock up if you start a new project and just create a very simple song? c) does it lock up with your other Reaper projects?

*sigh*: if you had less than 2gb ram before, i reckon one of your plugins isn't /3gb aware. search the forums.

Heh. My previous setup had 4GB RAM and my new setup does also. Memtest says my RAM is fine. I'll let it run through a few more cycles tonight. I couldn't duplicate the lockup problem again the rest of yesterday, so this may take me a while to track down. Thanks for the suggestions. I'm confident I'll achieve a stable system.

that's cool and everything but there's maybe a decade's worth of Win32 code out there that was built and tested with the assumption that 2Gb-3Gb would be used for device addressing and 3Gb-4Gb would be windows private-use addressing (if i'm wrong here i'd love for a guru to point out where the mistakes are). there's a code example in this link which demonstrates how subtle these problems can be: (code's a bit ugly but there's a LOT of ugly code out there in your favourite plugins, i reckon...) even if a dll is large-address aware, stuff like that could still exist in there. hitting a single line like that will bring down the whole DAW - but on a 2gb system it'd work perfectly.

It occurs to me after reading your post and the link you provided, that any program can have bad code and fail to account for certain conditions. Some plugins and hosts perform poorly with some chipsets, some are optimized under certain conditions, etc. In other words, plugins can bring a host to its knees for a variety of reasons. It doesn't strike me that there is any particularly greater risk of crashing running the 3GB switch, unless there is some documented issue. A good example: Amplitube simply crashes every host for me, regardless of the 3GB switch or not...Reaper, Tracktion, ProTools, all bring my computer to its knees even with 2GB. I think it's more helpful to document badly written plugins, rather than evangelize against using the 3GB switch...unless, of course, you're publishing software which crashes with the switch but is reliable otherwise - then I could see why one would want to discourage it!

64-bit would definitely be the way to go. I'm patiently waiting to see if the next 64 bit version of Windows will put Vista to shame. If it ends up being the same nonsense, that's when I think I'll consider switching to a Mac... BTW, my kudos to you for being a .net programmer - I had a few C# projects a while ago, and I never really took to it - I ended up going on the side of PHP and Cold Fusion...Fortunately, we can largely ignore memory pointers in all of the above languages, at least!

You didn't mention your graphics card, so I assume you're using onboard video? You might want to check that it's not using the same IRQ as your soundcard...it's not likely to be your problem, but onboard video, with its using of system ram, generally sucks. Also, did you make a point of downloading the latest drivers for your motherboard from Intel? Did you make sure to disable onboard sound in your bios? And, in case you have a bitchin 3d video card you didn't mention, are you sure your power supply is up to the task (though a wimpy PS usually causes a reboot I think).

I don't think this was mentioned before -- if an OS or hardware change causes Reaper to hang, the first place I would look would be the audio device driver. If you can start Reaper at all, switch the audio system to waveout/onboard and don't enable the hardware audio interface at all, if the project then plays, it indicates a problem with the audio device driver.