Program settings

[chunst]

Does anyone know of a setting which toggles weather or not a program (in this case Nuendo) will stop when another program (fruity loops for example) is selected in the foreground. Does that make sense?

[sabianq]

you are thinking about something called "Process Priority"
an application does not "stop" if it gets moved to the background, the processor sets it to a lower priority.
the only way to make it stop is to end the application.

read this Microsoft page for more information.
if you need more performance, you need to get more on-board memory
1.5 gigabytes or better of on-board ram is recommended

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/archive/winntas/maintain/turbo1.mspx?mfr=true


Because of the diverse needs of these programs, Windows NT allows you to control how much processor time each individual process gets. To see how much time a given process receives, open the Windows NT Task Manager and select the Processes tab. Right-click on the process whose priority you want to change and select Set Priority from the resulting context menu. As you can see in Figure F, you can select from four priority levels for each process.
Figure F: You can use Task Manager to control a process's priority.
http://img.microsoft.com/library/media/1033/technet/images/archive/winntas/maintain/turbo1f.gif
Figure F: You can use Task Manager to control a process's priority.
See full-sized image.

Priorities range from 0 to 31. By default, processes start with a priority of 7, which falls in the low-priority range. If you move an application to the foreground, Windows NT automatically boosts its priority to 15 or higher, which falls in the Realtime category.

Earlier, when we showed how to regulate your swap file, you may have noticed the Boost slide bar on the Performance tab of the System properties sheet, as shown in Figure G. This slide bar controls the priority of the application running in the foreground. If you're using Windows NT Workstation, we recommend setting the Boost level to Maximum, which gives the foreground application the highest reasonable amount of processor time. However, if you're running Windows NT Server, chances are that the foreground application is less important than the services the computer is providing to the attached users. If this is the case, you should consider setting the Boost level to None.

[MrHope]

There are some registry hacks which allow you to change the default process priority for the foreground program. You shouldn't use them however, because they can have a bad effect on background programs. Registry hacks are a bit dangerous because if you do them wrong, you can ruin your whole computer installation.

A simpler approach is to use a task/process viewer program to modify the process priorities as the programs are running.

Here is one program for doing that:

http://gilchrist.ca/jeff/SetPriority/index.html

If you want to live dangerous and try the registry hack, it can be found here:

http://www.mdgx.com/

You'll need to search for CPU PRIORITY under your operating system I think, but I'm not sure, I don't remember.

[chunst]

Those answers, although appreciated, are long and complicated and might have caused me to frig up my system. The simple answer, I found elsewhere on this awesome forum. I only had to uncheck "release ASIO driver in the background" and everything worked fine. Thanks fellas.