That article should be required reading for ALL Vegas users!!!

SCS should create their own related article for Vegas!

6 Hour DEEP Level 86Memtest thingy = CHECK

Microsoft Security thingy = CHECK

Temperature thingy = CHECK

Startup Garbage = CHECK

The only thing left is that BETA driver . . . . mixed reactions here on the Forum? No?

G

Grazie, I have a Dell laptop that has been misbehaving ever since I got it in 2009. Periodically it would just freeze. Finally it became so frequent and annoying that I committed to spending days doing all that you did (one whole day for the diagnostics). Everything checked out perfect. I disabled half the non-microsoft services, then flipped to the other half. I disabled half the startup, then flipped to the other half. Removed and reseated ram. Went through every driver in device manager and had Windows check for new drivers. And probably a lot more things I'm not thinking of. Finally, out of desperation I downloaded Intel's Driver Manager ($29 I think). It scanned my PC and found 44 drivers out of date, including critical chip set drivers! I am certain I had downloaded and installed the latest chip set drivers. At any rate, I updated the 44 drivers and have been running for weeks now without a freeze. So moral of this story, Win 7 Device Manager LIES ;-).

/jerry

So moral of this story,A corollary to this moral (if morals can have corollaries) is that if you finally get your computer into that Nirvana state of stability, for goodness sake, turn off ALL automatic updates. The next update can just as easily break something as cure something and if it ain't broke ... well, you know the rest.

I regularly use a seven-year-old computer which is still almost as fast as my modern "screamer" (except for rendering) and it has not been updated once in those seven years.

As for the Vegas stability problems being due to the issues outlined in the most-excellent article, I very much doubt that is the case. The stability issues in Vegas 10 & 11 are real, and are in Vegas. This is not to say that some people don't have problems with other things, especially video drivers and cooling, but most of what I've seen posted in this forum is caused by problems within Vegas. I have experienced them myself, and I am quite certain that they are not caused by ANY of the problems outlined in the article.

Update video drivers my donkey! I just did that to try to play a game and here's the results:
*VERY sluggish response in Vegas on TL & in preview
*Nero wouldn't burn any disks
*All my 2D windows redraw wasn't just noticeable, I could count to "1" before it would finish drawing

Uninstalled drivers, installed the last ones I installed (from April '11) and everything worked again. Talk about amazing, eh?

If something doesn't work the by all means update drivers, etc. If it won't DON'T TOUCH! (Vegas 10 still runs great for me)

Obviously, I should have added that I can STILL crash either my stable laptop or my stable video editing PC with Vegas 10 or 11. But they are stable with my other apps. Sigh...

/jerry

jerry - that was one piece of vital info! Right there . . . .

So, having done all the testing, VP still crashes? Yes?

G

Yes, but... All the testing was on my laptop which I only occasionally use for Vegas. My normal video editing PC is still running Vista 64 bit. I have not done that level of testing on it - it already seems rock steady for everything except Vegas 10 and 11. I don't run any office products on it. I do run a number of Adobe products (Photoshop, After Effects, Lightroom, Illustrator) and a number of utilities.

I am going to convert that PC to Win 7 64 bit in a few weeks (reformat and clean install) and I'll be sure I have everything set up as clean as possible. Hopefully Vegas will run better for me then.

/jerry

I'm with John Meyer on this.

I haven't updated my hardware in years and I'm still running XPpro. Though I get paid, I do video projects as an avocation, and the system I edit on is the one I use for everything else. Aside from a power supply failure that took out a couple of hard drives 5 years ago (oh, and a bad motherboard that had some blown caps), my system is up 24/7 and NEVER drops the ball, even though it's overclocked by 20%.

Video editing is not (or shouldn't be) rocket science. The NLE should be as rock-stable as your word processor or browser. The only thing the NLE does differently is that it (a) runs your processor cores full-tilt, often for hours at a time, (b) can use hundreds of MB of ram, and (c) can consume dozens of GB of disk space for a single project.

But that implies that if your CPU is adequately cooled, the ram is a quality brand, and the hard drives and power supply are stable, there should be no difference between booting your NLE and booting Microsoft Word.

If your system can cheerfully run Memtest and Prime95 all day, and all other programs run fine, then any issues with your NLE are the fault of the NLE, in my view.

I started with Vegas3. I now use 7d. Utterly stable. Yes, I know the world has moved on and that for most of you guys there's no way of getting or loading Vegas 7 (HDV) or 8 (AVCHD). But to me it's clear that something's been lost in recent versions of this great product. For the most part, I don't think the blame lies with the platform.