reason 12 restarts my machine every half hour

[stranj]

After 20 odd years of reason being one of the most reliable and bombproof apps i've ever used, i upgraded to 12 and have terrible problems. the machine hard resets every 20 mins to half hour.

i'm fairly confident in this machine, i have a decent anti malware routine, i use it for other software (unreal and 3d apps) professionally and i keep it in good nick. on the hardware side i blow it out regularly (omg get yourself a power blower, they're awesome) , and i dutifully wiggled all the cables and tried running with no other perhipherals plugged in except mouse and keyboard.

iteration time for this bug is high so i havent been able to be exhaustive in trying stuff.

i still have reason 10 on the machine which i upgraded from, and that runs reliably. I know its a long shot given the complexity of windows systems, but has anyone had a similar experience with 12?

[Aquila]

Since the graphics is one of the major feature updates of v12, it's definitely worth double checking your graphics drivers are up to date.

[spacepluk]

how are your cpu temps?

[selig]

You say "the machine" resets, not "Reason crashes the machine" - is this correct? Is Reason ever the only app running when this happens?
You could also try to downgrade Reason to 10 on the machine giving you the problems – 'eliminate the variables' troubleshooting stating point.
I don't know windows systems all that well, but this could also possibly be a hardware issue in my experience.

[stranj]

so new development,

i switched back to reason 10, which seemed to work ok for a while, but as of today reason 10 now exhibits the same behaviour , restarting the machine with no bluescreen or warning, which means the problem is now just "any version of reason" - i'm trying to replicate it with other audio software but no joy so far.

while i was experimenting with the drivers i was able to get a random restart by jiggling the buffer size. i've tried switching away from asio4all and using MME but i've also had restarts using that, so i'm now running out of ideas.

your questions:
graphics drivers - i will go update them, they are fairly new but yea, its the first thing one should try when debugging. good idea. those are also intertwined with audio somehow no doubt.

cpu temps were high when i started having the problem but i did a blowout and i'm sitting about 34c , i doubt its that.

The computer performs what looks like a hard reset after short periods of using Reason - at first just 12 and now also 10. immediate black screen and reboot with no delay. no errors mentioned in boot, win11 boots up again just fine. cannot reproduce the behaviour with any other software no matter how heavy duty.

right now, yes reason is the only app running - side apps include steam, epic launcher, nvidia control panel, asio4all, malwarebytes. and of course whatever other cursed stealth installs i've had to perform in general computer use - game launchers, vr drivers, adobe support apps

general performance of the machine is good, i use it daily as mentioned.

[stranj]

arrg. updated graphics drivers, booted reason 12, tried to make it do the thing with driver switching for a while, remained good - loaded up an older song and played with it for a while, worked great for an hour,

then bam, restart with no warning again. at this rate maybe i should just try a clean windows install.

[DaveyG]

It's almost certainly a hardware issue. Overheating or RAM error or something.
You'll be able to cause the same symptom with other processor/memory intensive software if you drive it hard enough.

[jam-s]

To me this sounds like either broken RAM or bad thermal connection of the CPU to the heat spreader. To debug it further you should run memtest and also enable the display of bluescreens instead of immediate reboot in windows.