No troubles here...and I use Vegas a LOT.

Filmy, I'd prefer ZG to take on board a series of fixes that are being proffered here. Apply those fixes one at a time and report back. This would provide us all with a valuable debate and further OUR understanding of what works or not.

As yet I haven't read about any fixes that have been instituted by ZG. I suppose we need to be patient and await developments.

If OCking is an issue, would this be a simple *fix* to instigate? I'm no computer engineer, so take my *naive* view on this as just that. But seeing this having been tried and maybe resulting in a solution, then we could take things further forward. Or could it be that ZG doesn't wish to down clock his system? Has he set up his pc to work at this pace and thinks that Vegas should fit in with what he wishes. Hmm.....

When I read someone having *troubles* with this s/w, that I'm really enjoying, personally I try and rally round - as others - and attempt to give some ideas/solutions to try out. I do this because I really want to assist, from even my small experience, allowing that individual to carrying on using this remarkable s/w.

Vegas might not be for everybody. Some people have found the actual editing process - moving clips, cutting and shuffling - a tad trying - yeah? But it does have many many virtues.

Zippy, have you tried out any of the *down-clocking* suggestions yet? If you haven't can you tell us why?

Regards,

Grazie

I have just recently upgrade my comptuer with a new AMD motherboard which is capable of running the new 400MHZ FSB processors from AMD. I purchased a 2600+ processor running at 333MHz FSB. I also purchased RAM capable of running at 400MHz figureing that I could run the memory at the 400 rate and the CPU at a lesser speed.

That method doesn't work very well. I get random program crashes and other strange problems when the RAM speed and FSB aren't matched. So I clocked back the RAM to 333MHz to match the FSB. Everything runs perfectly.

The reason I posted this is just to point out that, if everything is not in sync you could have problems. If anything is running to hot you could have problems. Like MusicVid said above, if everything is overclocked, that probably means the AGP slot is overclocked also. If the graphic card is running too hot, the graphics drivers may be crashing inside the card.

I learned a few years ago that the graphics card driver seems to be the single most important driver on the system. If it crashes or is buggy, it can cause a whole slew of problems that don't necesarily seem graphics related.

Hope this helps some of you guys.

JBJones

>>>I learned a few years ago that the graphics card driver seems to be the single most important driver on the system. If it crashes or is buggy, it can cause a whole slew of problems that don't necesarily seem graphics related.<<<

Very true. The system I use right now, when we first got it it would lock up...a lot. Gateway ran through the usual items - uninstall drivers, update drivers, re-install windows and so on. On my own I actually narrowed it down to the AGP video card so I just took it out and put in a spare PCI card I have for these cases and it solved the problem - no more crashes. I told Gateway and they said "ok" and sent me a new AGP card and return postage for the one that was NG. This is one of the reason I also love them - you can actually go into your computer, within reason, and they won't suddenly say "ohhhh....baaaad baaaad!! you voided out your warrenty! We can't help you anymore."

The other thing I have seen is the CPU fan dies and the system starts locking up. I have really only seen this on one system - the first time it did it I was a bit dumbfounded as to why it was crashing, than I saw the CPU fan was not working. So I replaced it- no more crashes. But than the new fan died and I replaced it...than that one died and replaced that. Almost one fan a year and really haven't a clue as to why that one PC, and only that one, burns out fans so much.

Great post JB, the over-clocking is probably the issue here, the title of the post though is exactly what someone on the Pinnacle Studio 8 board grazed for here on this board to come back to a post that VV was a great program with great stability etc. as opposed to Studio 8. Most of the time VV has problems it's because the system that's running it has a config problem of some sort.

1. The AMD Thoroughbred 2100+ "Revision B" is actaully a factory underclock processor...thus I've overclocked it well under what it is capable.

2. Here's the specs on my motherboard. (it does support ATA133)

http://www.msicomputer.com/product/detail_spec/product_detail.asp?model=K7N2G-ILSR

3. I'm using the onboard video which is essentially a Nvidia Gforce 4 MX440.

4. My memory timings are set automatically by the motherboard in the BIOS ("SPD")

5. Farss/Billyboy, I do have many processes running in the background. Can you elaborate more on them and tell me how to get rid of them or at least get them to stop from running?

6. Billyboy, where exactly is the "event log"?

I know Windows Sucks ( I prefer Mac OSX). I know that Vegas doesn't totally suck, but my experiences with it (mind you every other program on my computer runs fine) are becoming frustrating ones. My patience is running low...as are my pills.

I'm not "trolling" or "grazing" from Pinnicle or any other forums.

So, to help everyone understand my position and believe my need, I will rephrase my "Subject" so people will stop trying to defend a product (Vegas) and instead try to help the hurt (me or any othe person needing honest help to resolve computer/software problems).

SUBJECT: My experiences with Microsoft Windows XP Professional and Sonic Foundry's Vegas Video 4.0d are starting to suck! Also, my experiences with every program that crashes, stalls or in any way prevents me from being constructive and efficient.

I agree that xp rev b are excellent overclockers,,, but if I was having problems i would set back to factory speed and see what happens before i assumed there is a problem .Takes a minute,try it already.

But thats just me

So many response that I haven't read them all so forgive me, I'm sure others may have said the same things.

I can't reproduce this on my home machine:
1ghz PIII w 512MB of Ram

Project:
1 audio track
1 track with still photo
1 text track with light rays starting huge and going to nothing.

I played it on the internal and external previews no problems at all except that it's damn slow

So:
Can you produce the same effect entirely with generated media?
If so, can you post a Veg file?
By any chance, are you playing back from a 1394 drive? If so, try moving the media to an internal drive on the IDE bus and see how that plays.

Of course, stop overclocking and test it. The CPU may easily run at higher speeds but surely it runs hotter at those higher speeds. You must be running it at 100% to play back this part of the project. It's surely getting hot. Whether that's the problem I don't know but you should eliminate the possibility.

Rob Mack

Darn!

The few related apps I use with it?

Photoshop
Dreamweaver
Word
Excel
IE and Mozilla
And a bunch of lesser apps that do "one thing" well

I don't have a problem. But I could use a third screen.

Rob Mack

I'm using Vegas 4.0 with Windows XP Pro and not had any problems. The times I have had problems, as other posts on this forum will attest, it was far more often than not, something *I* was/wasn't doing.

Sorry I can't be of more help, but as someone said earlier, if it were a "bug" we'd all be experiencing it under similar conditions.

Folks here like BillyBoy and Chienworks have forgotten more than I'll ever know. However, the one thing I've learned about computers over the years is this: It only takes one mis-typed key, one out-of-place digit to make the entire system bow up in the back and refuse to run properly (if at all). Therefore, based on *my* experience, I would urge you to re-examine your technique, then when you absolutely certain it's not you, then take a look at your system. Once that checks out undeniably, then it might be the application, since that's all that's left.

Honestly, I hear what your're saying about the frustration. I went through that last week and first part of this with DVD-A. It was my fault. I had to eat some crow (not bad when grilled just right).

Best of luck to you!

<rant>
I'm not anti Microsoft. Heck, I'm even a stockholder. I do at times like anybody that uses their computer extensively have seen Windows do some pretty lame things. Since I know a thing or two about computers, (I ought to, having worked with them since the 70's) I sometimes am a little critical of Windows because some things that are broke and were broke years ago are STILL broke and the fact that Microsoft knows that and still doesn't fix what's broke does get frustrating.
</end rant>

XP gives three Event logs. You can see them by going to Control Panel, Performance and Maintenance/ Administrative Tools/Event Viewer. There you'll see three categories, Application/Security/System. Generally most of the things that upset Windows get recorded under Application and System.

Events with a red flag are errors that may have caused a crash or lockup. Double clicking on any event will bring up more information about the event and usually gives you a clue what went wrong.

Yellow flags are similar but shouldn't have caused a crash or lockup and are more a warning that either something that should have happened didn't or something that did happen shoudn't have happened. The none colored messages are just informaitonal. For example every time you boot, Windows needs to do several things and it just records what those things were.

Processes are either applications in the traditional sense like Vegas, or some internal funcion that needs to be running for Windows to do what you're asking of it.

One of the gripes I and others have with Microsoft is their policy is basically 'turn everything on' regardless if your typical user needs it or not. Such narrow thinking results in some security risks such as enabling file sharing through NETBIOS. This opens the door for some hacker to sneak into your system through a port (there are 65,000) and in effect hijack your computer by installing a Trojan a form of a virus. As that name suggests such malicious software gets in through a back door and can take over your computer as in use it to send SPAM email for example and the typical user may never know. A good reason you should be operating behind a firewall so you at least know if any application tries to 'phone home' without your knowledge.

Anyhow... you can disable many services.

Control Panel/Administratve Tools/Services Double click on Services and expand the Window to full size. Go to the Extented tab at bottom. You may want to expand the left Window pane. As you click on the long laundy list a brief description explains what the "sevice" does. Double clicking bring up antoehr window to show more info and allow you to customize. The columns Status and Start up showing the current state of the service and if or not it started up when you booted Windows.

You'll notice many services are stared and may be either manual or automatic. Disabling some with cause Windows to malfunciton. Others like Messenger for example can be turned off.

Why would you want to disable some services?

Because each one is a "process" and is taking up a certain amount of your memory. The more memory in use the less Windows has for other things... like rendering that big file of yours and that means it will need to shuffle more things in and out of the Paging file (Swap File).

If you're running XP, it can help you see how well your system is preforming and using resouces.

Click Ctrl/Alt/Delete to bring up Task Manager. This window by default "floats" so you can resize and leave it visible as you do other things.

Click on the Performance tab. Note the area at the bottom. The first section reports handles, threads and processes. Too technical to get into for this forum, lets not go there.

Below it is the Commit Charge. The numbers show how well Windows is using your memory. Typical of Microsoft the labeling is confusing. Total isn't total memory, rather the current total memory in use. The lower the better. Limit is your total actual RAM (your physical memory in your PC) plus the size of your Paging File or your Virtual Memory. Peak is how much of RAM and Virtual Memory has been used since your last boot. These numbers change in real time.

Obviously if the values shown under Total or Peak approach the Limit then either you don't have enough RAM or your Virtual Memory allocation is too low for the tasks you're asking Windows to do.

Physical Memory shows how much you have installed and what is and isn't in use. Again if much or most of your physical memory is in use then you need more memory for the tasks you're doing. Starting and stopping tasks can have a prefound effect on these values. The Kernel Memory is also imporant. The kernel is any operating system is the "brains" of the OS. The way XP is designed some of the kernel is always paged regardless how much RAM you have. The little windows to the left show CPU and Paging File useage.

Click again on the Processes tab, then View, then select columns. You can add many other things to watch by clicking here. Example Vitrual Memory Size shows by process how much virtual memory is being used. Sometimes if you computer hasn't locked up yet, watching VM will show some process or application taking more and more virtual memory. Another clue.

BillyBoy,
good info. I only run Win2K so don't have any in depth knowledge on how to look under the hood of XP.
Getting back to just what's going wrong for Zippy, nothing would seem to have crashed. From what he's saying once he gets control back all works fine again.
Maybe we're looking too deeply into this problem, from what I can see it's simply a matter of VV loosing focus and I've been caught out by this many times. That's not VV's fault, its a well behaved windows app and relinquishes control always. I'd suggest that maybe it's a little too compliant, being able to capture, preview and PTT while letting the OS time slice to other apps is an easy way for things to go wrong that your code has no control over.
Now Zippys going to say there are no other apps running but even VV itself is several apps. I can start the timeline off playing something out and set focus to say the explorer. When I hit the spacebar its not going to stop playing, the OS wont send it to the code controlling the timeline player. Worse still whetever does have focus may decide it doesn't want to relinquish control so I cannot get focus back to the timeline so it just keeps playing away.

Do a search on 'Chienworks', about 6 months ago I recall him helping a poster with similar problems, about out of control playback. 2 of his suggestions were to turn off auto save and set your VV priority to high in Task Manager. It seemed to work for that poster and has become a habit of mine. Well written explanation Bill Boy. Zippy, Do you have separate system drive and apps drive? Good Luck John

PS, I've found this weekeds forum to be especially interesting and informative. Thanks to you all

"...through a port (there are 65,000)..."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Oh, to be a Microsoft sailor. Very informative post, BillyBoy.

Funny how uStuff gets blamed for everything!
Believe it or not, not everything to do with computers was invented by uStuff, not even Bill would claim that, Steve seems to think that way but not Bill.

The number of ports is a function of the TCP/IP specification, if you wanted to blame it on anyone it'd be the Unix world but even that's wrong, although they were using it long before uStuff started supporting it.

I went back up and read the initial post again, and realized that I've had a similar experience but not to the extreme of having to shut down the computer. What I gathered from my situation was the Vegas was simply taxing the CPU to much and left nothing for the interface calculations. In my situation the mouse would freeze for about 3 seconds and then jump to the last location I tried to move it to. Then freeze again for about 3 seconds. Then jump. etc.

What you might try, Zippy is making the preview window smaller, or changing the preview window quality. Both of those should use less CPU rescources. See if that helps or changes anything.

My guess it that this is some sort of mild bug, because I don't recall it ever happening before 4.0b when we got HD resolutions. But in my case it wasn't enough of a problem that I thought about reporting it.

JBJones

I've had much the same happen and I think your analysis is correct, I'd dropped about a dozen 35 MByte tiff stills on the timeline. VV took a while to respond to anything. I then learnt that VV uses a QT component to decompress tiffs so that would explain a lot, while that's happening VV doesn't have focus and the process that does wouldn't respond to keypresses.

I had the same thing happen this morning on this slow old beast, I'd downloaded a 7 MByte jpeg from NASA and IE just about went into a coma, everthing else ran like porridge until IE had finished.

Sometimes the system is just busy and so you see the hour glass and your whole system will be sluggish REGARDLESS how powerful a PC you got or how much memory.

For example, I've noticed that for some reason some larger files Vegas seems to have trouble building the peaks on the audio track. It takes much longer than normal. I doubt this is a "bug" is the classic sense because other files just as large or larger build peaks much faster. Chances are its something in the source file that is causing Vegas to take much longer to digest it.

Also give Vegas a chance. If you start a preview while a file is still loading playback can be sluggish. VERY sluggish. How sluggish depends on the power of your sytem and the complexity of what's getting loaded and how much Vegas is processing. Some FX filters are very processor intensive.

Do you have a licensed copy of Vegas 4, or is it a cracked version?

BTW, It's not simply microsoft that creates 65,000 ports. The ports are a part of TCP/IP, The 65000 is just a magic number, and TCP is not an invention of MS.

The habit of installing a system with ports open by default is also not an MS only sin. Many Linux distros do this too. The manufacturer is trying to make a pleasing first impression. "It works right out of the box".

As far as bugs in an OS go, I'm afraid they exist all around. There are plenty of updates for Linux distros and applications because there are plenty of holes. The difference is that the Linux community tends to patch things as fast as it can and many of the Linux holes aren't catastrophic because the system is more tightly locked down by nature.

Windows is a target for hackers because it's easier to hack, it's everywhere, and it's powerful. But make no mistake, all systems are sitting ducks-castles that a hacker can lay siege to until they crack it.

Rob Mack

This is the list of process that are aparently running on my computer. I've listed them EXACTLY as they are listed on my computer. I'm not sure what each of them are, so if anyone knows, please let me know if I can remove or disable them. I'm not sure why there are so many svchost.exe listed...whatever that means. Thanks.

NAVAPW32.EXE
IAMAPP.EXE
type32.exe
explorer.exe
acrotray.exe
Netscp.exe (this one isn't auto on startup; just running now to post this)
taskmgr.exe
svchost.exe
System Idle Process
System
fxssvc.exe
smss.exe
csrss.exe
winlogon.exe
services.exe
lsass.exe
svchost.exe
svchost.exe
spoolsv.exe
NAVAPSVC.EXE
NISUM.EXE
NPROTECT.EXE
nvsvc32.exe
pctspk.exe
NOPDB.EXE
svchost.exe
SYMPROXYSVC.EXE
NISSERV.EXE