Ableton Forum

Kodama wrote:I would:

1. Confirm the Alesis works well on another machine that works well w FW sound cards. Maybe even try it on a comp at the store?

Then (assuming #1 goes well):

2. Just spring $30 to pop in a known good (Belkin? IO Gear?) FW card in an open PCI slot.

The Alesis worked just ok on the laptop, better than the new rig. The lappy has a TI fw card. I was experienceing yellow and occasional red spikes on the DPC with just about everything turned off in the device manager that I could, and the tweaks from XPmusic. I was struggling with using both my M-Audio Fast Track and the Alesis iO/14, high latency. On top of that, There was no option to turn off hyperthreading in the BIOS, and so concluded that the laptop was the main bottle neck. Enter the Quad.

I am waiting for a friend to flick me a free PCI FW card, hence the small delay ( plus I am out working big days right now).

My course of action was to try, with the free PCI card, to eliminate the possible IRQ conflict with a USB Host Controller and the 2 Sata drives in the box. I can disable the onboard FW via the BIOS.

Next I was going to roll back the Alesis Driver to an earlier version, however leedsquiteman has had great success with his Alesis and the latest drivers.

I had not got to thinking much about updating the BIOS. I will move that up in the order while I am waiting, and see if I get a difference.

Thanks for the input.

yeah, the chipset on the firewire card is a big culprit as well - good luck and post your findings

gjm wrote:

Kodama wrote:I would:

1. Confirm the Alesis works well on another machine that works well w FW sound cards. Maybe even try it on a comp at the store?

Then (assuming #1 goes well):

2. Just spring $30 to pop in a known good (Belkin? IO Gear?) FW card in an open PCI slot.

The Alesis worked just ok on the laptop, better than the new rig. The lappy has a TI fw card. I was experienceing yellow and occasional red spikes on the DPC with just about everything turned off in the device manager that I could, and the tweaks from XPmusic. I was struggling with using both my M-Audio Fast Track and the Alesis iO/14, high latency. On top of that, There was no option to turn off hyperthreading in the BIOS, and so concluded that the laptop was the main bottle neck. Enter the Quad.

I am waiting for a friend to flick me a free PCI FW card, hence the small delay ( plus I am out working big days right now).

My course of action was to try, with the free PCI card, to eliminate the possible IRQ conflict with a USB Host Controller and the 2 Sata drives in the box. I can disable the onboard FW via the BIOS.

Next I was going to roll back the Alesis Driver to an earlier version, however leedsquiteman has had great success with his Alesis and the latest drivers.

I had not got to thinking much about updating the BIOS. I will move that up in the order while I am waiting, and see if I get a difference.

Thanks for the input.

did you try turning down the hardware acceleration for the video card? that and the TI card was the clincher for me, but only because my TI card and video card shared an IRQ.

adventurepants_ wrote:did you try turning down the hardware acceleration for the video card? that and the TI card was the clincher for me, but only because my TI card and video card shared an IRQ.

Yes I did. That was one of the tricks you suggested with the lappy and I did see a change. However with the Desktop, it messed with the dual screen set up somehow, kept getting an error type message on the screen. It was late when I did it and didn't really fiddle too much. I will go again with this with a fresh face and pay attention. Thanks.

If there's any USB card-reader installed on the laptop, deactivate it.

Crash wrote:If there's any USB card-reader installed on the laptop, deactivate it.

+1 for that. a lot of firewire/card reader chipsets on pc lappies are the crapful integrated Ricoh type, that work fine as long as you dont want to actually use them!

I have updated the BIOS. From the notes with the file the update had something to do with memory management.

I have installed a VIA brand PCI card. Interestingly the IRQs the card chose was either 16, which also hosted the video card, or 17 which hosted the ethernet conection and 2x PCIe spots, depending on which PCI slot I installed it into.





I Chose the second slot, and IRQ 17 because, as far as I am aware I have nothing installed in the PCIe slots. (Then again, if nothing was installed then there should not be an IRQ assignment. )

Also, I disabled the ethernet connection because I am not on the net with the music machine when using Live.

Is my thinking sound?

I have also disabled the onboard FW chip using the BIOS.

I have quickly given the machine a lite work out, just one audio track. On the first take the buffer was too small at 128 and the sound blew out. I then adjusted it higher, then back to 128, and now it seems ok. I will try a heavier go later this weekend.

Hi gjm,

i did not read the threat in details but a friend of mine installed a Q6600 for me on thuesday, which is running smoothly here. First he did a BIOS Update for my MB (Asus P5B, an Old one), then a complete reset of all BIOS settings.
What i noted was , you have to be careful about your RAM timings and settings. Then he was running programms like CPUz to check if all components are recognized and then Prime95 to test CPU and RAM very extensively. It appeard that our RAM settings where wrong and reseted this back to "AUTO". Now the only problem is a little unstable UAD2 driver.
Good luck, E.

My vaio laptop used to suffer from the old snap crackle and pop if I pushed the latency too low. With the help of DPC latency checker and a bit of trial and error I discovered that disabling the following devices fixes it. Hopefully some of them will apply to your system too.

Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Control Method Battery
Bluetooth (which I never use anyway)
All Network adaptors
Built in camera
Data and Fax Modem
Built in Audio Chip.

With those disabled it runs sweet as a nut. DPC checker still shows occasional amber spikes but it doesn't seem to affect performance.

Also I noticed that sometimes when Live crashes with a "Serious Program Error" It seems to take my Presonus Firepod with it. After relaunching Live the performance is really sluggish and crackly unless I reset the Firepod first.