Wildly fluctuating DSP meter

[CaptainBlack]

My i7 8700k system was working just fine. And then a hard disk died. Windows 10 Pro broke and I had to re-install everything. And then another hard disk died. And another is behaving strangely, being suddenly removed by Intel Rapid Storage mid-data transfer. I'm beginning to think it has a problem

Anyway, more relevant to Reason 10 is that the DSP meter is spiking on 3 or 4 bars, when it didn't before. It's not a complicated project and it wouldn't have been bothered before. I've no idea what's causing it. VSTs always make it worse, so I tried removing things one by one, till I was left with stock instruments. then it went down to about two bars. it should not be that high for a top CPU.

I'm beginning to suspect the power supply. Would inadequate juice cause that sort of behaviour?

[antic604]

Have you tried the usual stuff - enabling multi-core, disabling hyper-threading in Settings, enabling High Performance Power Profile in Windows, updating ASIO drivers, etc?

[CaptainBlack]

Yes, done all that. But even when there's nothing playing, the DSP meter is randomly going up and down. Looked under Task Manager at it says Reason CPU usage is about 20%.

[CaptainBlack]

To answer my own SOS, I followed everything in this guide and now it's back to what it should be. I've probably broken something important, but hey-ho.

https://www.sweetwater.com/sweetcare/ar ... indows-10/

I think the problem was that Windows 10 updated to version 1803 and changed all the settings back to resource hog.