I'm kind of a newbie to the whole computer recording thing, so there's a lot of stuff I'm fairly clueless about. A while ago, Computer Music Magazine wrote in their "Sequencer Tips" section about Standard PC vs. ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface) setup, leaving the impression that the latter really hampers PC performance. They also gave instruction as to how to change the configuration to Standard PC if you have Windows XP (which I do), and it sounded like a breeze - just go to the control panel, click on the "Computer" entry, select "ACPI", right click, select "Update Driver, Slect from List, "choose Standard PC". Up to this point, it's all as they describe it, but from then on - CM says "the computer will reboot and reinstall all of your hardware, assigning each item to individual IRQs". Yeah right - no such luck for me. There's all kins of screwups, the screen resolution changes, Windows asks for the french (!!!) version of the driver for my matrox graphics card, doesn't find drivers for several pieces of hardware, and, worst of all, does not detect my soundcard (audigy 2 platinum) anymore
. After resetting my computer to its initial state (which was a mess to, because windows renames some folders), I had to reinstall SONAR 2.0 (I don't remember any more now why that was the case, but anyway, that's what I did). It found all the projects alright, but since then I have a small problem with the Session Drummer Midi effect: It won't play any more as soon as there is an audio track with a recording on it; it starts for one beat or so and then immediately stops. Strangely enough, as soon as there is an Audio track armed for recording, it will 
. So, yeah, I can work around it that way, but it seems wrong, and I'm afraid I will run into some other problem somewhere down the road...So, here are my questions, and I would be very grateful if anybody had a good answer for any of these:
1) Is the difference between Standard PC/ACPI configuration really that big that I should have the Standard PC configuration (CM says its a big problem for Cubase SX; how about SONAR?). CM refers to the problem that an ACPI computer will route IRQ assignments to only one IRQ, even if others are free (I don't even really know what an IRQ is
)2) Will a "Standard PC" setup have negative effects on other features on my PC (I would imagine there ís a reason why regular PCs aer setup in ACPI mode)
3)If I should decide I NEED the "Standard PC" setup; how do I do that properly??? Is there a way to tell windows where that d#%! soundcard is?
4)Does anybody have a suggestion what's wrong with my session drummer midi effect?
5) This concerns performance: I used to be pretty happy with the performance of my computer until I got iZotope Trash and Ozone; I am absolutely ecstatic about the sound of these plugins, but I find them quite taxing on my CPU. My processor is an AMD Athlon XP2000+ with 1 Gig of DDR RAM (I just upgraded from 512 M, following advice from iZotope). If I run four tracks and three Isotope trash plugins (two guitar, one for bass
- that's kind of the minimum), my CPU is running at close to 40 % - even processed as mono, with speaker simulation down to low quality (5 on the scale). Is that normal? Ozone 3 is giving my PC a hard time, too, and kind of in a strange way; some of the presets, particualrily the "VOcal Treatment" one, seem to run on average at about 30%, which is O.K., but there are frequent sudden spikes which jack up CPU usage to over 50%, with accompanying pops and clicks. Is that normal? Occasionally, during tweaking of these high CPU demand presets, my computer crashes (yes, the computer, not just SONAR - I get a short hello from my motherboard, and then the PC starts to reboot.. 
). Whew... enough ... any comments?
Alex
Been down this road. When I did have ACPI enabled, it would shut down automatically. Now that I switched to Standard PC mode, I get the 'It's now ok to shut down your computer' and it sits there. All the checkboxes for turning off are NOT there, or are already checked. 