DAW experts?

[meiklejohn]

I'm losing the will to live...

I went and bought a dell computer purely for recording... I upgraded it to 8gb ram, I watched a few videos on optimising windows 7 for DAW's and made the changes they recommended and in theory I should now have a lean mean music making machine?

Cut a long story short I use reaper with a focusrite 2i4 interface, made a heap of different projects and downloaded a shed load of vsts... All was going well until one day I loaded up reaper and it came up saying that loads of the project was lost, I loaded up every project I had and they were all the same... So they all ended up getting scrapped after days of trying to repair the situation.

That was a while ago, however recently I decided to give it another bash, I've recorded a really nice version of I'd rather go blind which has a million instruments and effects and while I'm waiting for the singer to get the time it come out I'm shit scared of starting anything else incase I lose my work. Today I decided to jump on and just make some tweaks and when I loaded it up it said my effects were missing and I almost cried! LUCKILY I managed it get it back this time but I have no idea what the hell is going on! It also seems to be jumping and cracking sometimes and CPU is seriously high while it's playing?

Does anyone have an idea? Can anyone come and help me out? I'll happily pay someone to come and clean up my computer and get it running as it should for recording?

What I think personally is that I've went in too deep too quick, reaper is complicated! I'm thinking maybe I should go back to a simpler DAW?

What do you guys think?

Thanks

[Steviepearce]

Did you not just move files to a different location. Like saving all recorded files on your desktop then placing them in a folder?

[robkevertson]

Save your whole project on another hard drive then add the project to your pc everytime you want to do more work on it. I use mac but a pc should work exactly the same way. The vsts Will be on your machine somewhere. You need to locate them and make individual folders and mark them so you know where things are. On a mac all audio units (the equivalent of your vsts) are automatically stored in a part of the mac entitled components .