Please help me out of Firewire hell

[ekwipt]

Problem is probably your expresscard... You're running texas instruments firewire into a via expresscard bus (the firewire. card readers are normally the same controller, that's why you need texas instruments firewire built in)

An express card option won't fix the problem at low latencies

[Coupe70]

An express card option won't fix the problem at low latencies

I can confirm this for PCMCIA cards. My firewire port broke (mechanicaly)
on my old laptop and I tried to replace it using different PCMCIA cards.
No success at all...

[rikhyray]

Hey, i just got a new PC and I thought things would get better on the dropout and glitch front, but it stayed the same. I can't go below 256 samples without having constantly dropouts etc..
With 256 it's ok but stuff like resizing windows in Live with my touchpad cause dropouts which is really unbearable, this stuff even happens when I turn my WLAN/WIFI and hardware acceleration of my video card off...

WHAT SHALL I DO? Please give me advice.. I know it must be solvable

This is my setup:
Live 7.0.10
Lenovo Thinkpad T61 T9300 CPU, 2 GB RAM
Windows XP Sp3
Best Conectivity Firewire 1394a, 2-Port 34 mm Expresscard /w Texas Instruments Chipset
Digi002 Rack

Thank you !!!

Laura

Unlike typical consumer laptop the IBM software installed is really good and useful however for business not for music. It runs twice that much software by default as usual laptop. You can see in task manager 500-600 MB used without doing anything. There will be scanning going all the time schedulers for backups and what not.
You do not need any of that really. So it is not question of some soft that is just there those actually run every now and then- you dont want it for music production.
Open the task manager and google for those cryptic tp... whatever names, then once you know what these are disable uninstall what you dont need.
ested T61 with Nlite and it was running fine with couple of services including all key and similar utilities using around 140 MB default. I installed back regular install (minus all that biz stuff I dont need) since I have no problems.

run msconfig and see what you have in autostart
I use onlu tpshocks- you never know some drunkard hitting the booth on a gig,, TPOSVSVC- that is for hotkeys and PWMGR- since I like to change depending on what i do. I removed or disabled all the rest.
I do not tweak XP like few years ago but since you have problems you could check the standard XP music tweaks that were linekd on this forum numerous times.
T61 is the best notebook I could find, price wasn't really a factor, . I shifted from Vaios because of better build quality and cooling which is the best except high end Allienware.
It is too late but I never buy any notebook without checking if my soundcard work with it. The IBM dealer accepted my conditions, I brought my card, installed it, installed Live, run couple of sets and then paid.

Edit: Is your Power set to to full performance? What you describe sounds like what i had once forgetting to switch the power from idle (dl some movies when I am not working) to my normaal full performance setup.
You will have same problems if the power manager is set to Energy star or whatever names and shifts all the time the settings. For music, any serious work, always full power/performance setting.

[Dalibor Loncar]

(the firewire. card readers are normally the same controller, that's why you need texas instruments firewire built in)

you mix some things up here. if you have an incompatible built in FW chip on the mainboard of your laptop you can for sure use a compatible firewire expresscard with e.g. a TI chipset.

this probably will not work on every machine because some laptop models have a combined chip which controls the firewire port, the pcmcia slot, the flashcard/SD-card readers and the expresscard slot. these devices all share the same chip and as such the same IRQ because of the nature of their design (shared device with multiple functions). furthermore the expresscard slot of such laptops often is an usb type controller, so it uses usb 2.0 speed only. you´ll never get the bandwith of a native expresscard slot which is connected directly to the southbridge via pci express.

LAURA:

did you solve your issues? is your expresscard slot such a shared device maybe?

did you try the DPC latency checker tool from http://www.thesycon.de/eng/free_download.shtml and have you tried to disable individual devices in the device manager, one at a time?

i would start with the following devices:

-Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Control Method Battery (you´ll find this under batteries)
-Bluetooth (if there´s any in your laptop)
-some DVD/CD Drives are troublemakers also
-Graphics card (especially nvidia cards could cause trouble) - OK, you tried that already
-WLAN (these cards often have very high dpc times) - you tried this too, but try to disable the other devices mentioned above

another classy and more precise tool is RATTv3. it´s a tool for auditing the execution times of interrupt service routines (ISRs), deferred procedure calls (DPCs), and timer DPCs on systems that are running Windows XP only.

[duluxdog]

not particularly helpful as i guess it's not a solution you can follow right now but...

I solved all these issues by buying a mac.

Exactly why I bought one.. Hi-FIVE!

Seriously, though, the Lenovos are meant to be top-end Windows machines, aren't they? If I couldn't run my favourite sequencer on a firewire soundcard on those specs, right out of the box, i'd begin to question the worth of the OS I was running. Some people tolerate Windows because of the cost, or whatever, but aren't those Lenovos at those specs prett expensive anyway?

[ekwipt]

I was saying the same thing:

firewire/express card are normally built in together on laptops (they're called 4in1 card readers in the specs of most laptos, are normally made by via).

an express card with TI firewire therefore will not fix your problems....

[rikhyray]

Indeed if I was to use FW card MBP would be the choice, PCMCIA audio and that IBM build quality were the reasons to get T61.
I looked into system/manager and FW is on same IR with WLAN so I would disable it and see( not just off the hardware switch).
I used PCMCIA card for FW on T61 and it worked fine (video cameras and HDs, no audio card) I do not think that it will solve current problem but it is better anyway since 4pin FW will break sooner then later used daily.

[Laura_Live]

Hello everyone,

thank you so much for your replies. I installed Vista in the meantime and it didn't change anything.. same situation: dropouts below 256 Samples

It is not an impossible thing to run the interface at 64 Samples, right?

[Daim]

not particularly helpful as i guess it's not a solution you can follow right now but...

I solved all these issues by buying a mac.

fanboy

[rikhyray]

Hello everyone,

thank you so much for your replies. I installed Vista in the meantime and it didn't change anything.. same situation: dropouts below 256 Samples

It is not an impossible thing to run the interface at 64 Samples, right?

I still have my Nlite XP made for T61- with all drivers ( I think), if you want and have some server space could upload it for you so before anything else you could at least test it and see if it will work better.
It is 320MB

[Laura_Live]

Hello everyone,

thank you so much for your replies. I installed Vista in the meantime and it didn't change anything.. same situation: dropouts below 256 Samples

It is not an impossible thing to run the interface at 64 Samples, right?

I still have my Nlite XP made for T61- with all drivers ( I think), if you want and have some server space could upload it for you so before anything else you could at least test it and see if it will work better.
It is 320MB

Thank you very much for your offer. I might come back to it if I don't succeed at all. I haven't heard of those Slipstream methods yet. I might use vlite though..

Thanks for your insights!!

What interface / Firewire port are you using? Can you go down to 64 Samples without dropouts?

I have the 8895 WFJ Thinkpad T61 with a T9300 CPU and 2 GB Ram

[rikhyray]

It is not too difficult to make nLite XP. You might fail once or twice if you not careful what you disable. I did those few years back when it really made sense. I used dual boot and the performance XP had only 7 services default-60MB, no network just whatever necessary, the performance difference was very significant. Meanwhile the computers became so efficient that already since CoreDuo do not use it anymore on this Core2Duo did it just for testing.
i dont use FW audio.
Since I play/record live real time, like to cut latencies as much as possible that is why stick to PCMCIA ( not just because of audio latency but also midi which by PCI /PCMCIA is 3 ms less. then the best USB or Firewire interfaces).

[Dalibor Loncar]

I have the 8895 WFJ Thinkpad T61 with a T9300 CPU and 2 GB Ram

i had a look at the specs of your tp t61. it has both a PC Card Typ II/III and an Express Card/34/54 slot. the pc card slot is definitely controlled by a ricoh chip. as i can see in a product description there is no internal firewire port on that t61, right? that´s the reason why you are connecting you inteface via an expresscard interface, eh?

http://www.ricoh.com/LSI/product_pcif/p ... index.html

nevertheless i can´t imagine that the expresscard slot is also controlled by that ricoh chip, so it should be no problem at all to have your digidesign audiohardware controlled by your fw expresscard with better latencies than 256samples.

Laura, which latency was possible with your old notebook and the same audio interface?

i have tested vista also. i must say that vistas performance for audio isn´t acceptable for me at the moment, but i´m trying to find the culprit (i have installations of vista and xp on the same machine!).

nevertheless you don´t need to disable services under windows xp (you dont´need that slipstreamed xp disc), the xp tweaks you´ll find on the net are outdated and they apply to computers based on older technologies. my laptop has a T8100 CPU and i can run my interface via a firewire 800 expresscard controller with 88 samples under XP with no problems if i don´t overload the cpu (i can´t test it with 64 samples simply because my asio driver doesn´t allow that setting). and i tweaked my system only a bit. the only tweaks i did are:

i switched off the power schemes and disabled the system sounds.

for a dual core / core2duo processor you don´t need to change the processor scheduling to "background services" anymore.

furthermore i disabled some critical devices in the device manager after checking it with the latency checker tool.

LAURA: could you please post a screenshot while the latency checker mentioned before is running? did you maybe try the recommended RATTV3 tool under XP?

Do you have the newest bios for your thinkpad?

[gjm]

My hunch is the SP1 thing might be bogus.

I recant! It is true. Microsoft did down grade the Firewire speed to 100mb/s in SP2. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/885222 Hmmmmm.

[adventurepants_]

My hunch is the SP1 thing might be bogus.

I recant! It is true. Microsoft did down grade the Firewire speed to 100mb/s in SP2. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/885222 Hmmmmm.

nice find. this gets curiouser and curiouser. yet you saw no speed differences between the sp3 driver and the rollback one?