Ableton Forum

I'm posting this in the general forum, since it's not a problem with Live itself.

I'm using a Dell 5150, and I'm getting occasionally screen slowdowns, which also affect audio playback, causing it to stutter. I'll be typing, say, in Trillian while listening to iTunes, and the Trillian window will buffer my text and iTunes will stutter. Then, after about a second, the text catches up in Trillian and iTunes is back to normal. Sometimes this happens three or four times in a row, then quits for a while. It is seemingly random.

I also had this problem on my last machine, a Vaio FRV25, so I don't think it's a driver problem. It must be something with my config. I've scoured the Web to no avail, so I'm asking here. I get this behavior using both an Indigo I/O and the onboard AC97 sound on the Dell.

Ideas? Please don't say 'get a Mac'. I have a Mac. It doesn't have this problem, but it also can't run 4 Absynths and 4 reverbs in parallel, either.

Possible virus or spyware is usually your first culprit. Pull up your task manager and see what is hogging your CPU when it spikes.

Yeah, the first thing I though was spyware, too. I ran AdAware, and got rid of a bunch of crap, but still had the problem. Symantec AV comes up clean. Both apps ran with with latest definitions.

I never took seriously the Maco fanatics talking how bad Windows are but now must admit it is so. I simply always had them tweaked, couple of hours of work everytime. Now I have "internet" partition with all the standards, firewallsanti spy virus, hardly tweaked. It is shit, irrtating , slow, slow, ssslllloooowwww
So apart from getting rid of the junk you may already have, better google the audio XP, XP tweak etc etc, invest your time and you will save yourself a lot of time in the end.

Yeah. I've been using Windows and Macs for audio for years, but I've never encountered anything like this on a Windows box. It's weird that it happened on two separate machines, too. Maybe there is something malicious floating around the LAN, I don't know. I'll check out the audio tweaks site. Isn't there some uber-site that r0xx0rz?

Service pack 2 makes XP a bit more sluggish (check slashdot; there were a few articles there when it came out)... you can revert it if you're really curious about windows performance.

IIRC, I had this problem on the VAIO before SP2 came out. I don't remember, though ... maybe it is an SP2 problem. Any other SP2 users on this board who have this same issue?

there is only 32 meg of video so that might be the problem .

have you tweaked window? if not try this link
http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/supertweaks.htm

also go to musicxp.net

When you open the task manager how many programs are running in the background? It could be a hardware problem like a bad stick of RAM of a hard drive going bad. Does it ever totally freeze and require a reset?

Also can you disable the Dell's onboard sound?

Only the apps that I want running are running. I've disabled a lot of stuff with msconfig. Anything in particular you can think of? Also, I don't want to disable the onboard sound, because sometimes I use it.

Well it's hard to tell with the info. in your post, but it sounds like the problem happens only or mostly when you are playing audio? The first thing I would do is disable the onboard sound. Alot of times sound cards don't like each other, and it can be impossible to get many sound cards to "play nice" with each other. I would go with only 1 card. You say you had this problem on another PC. Now did you use the Indigo I/O on that machine as well?

Good question. Yes, I used the Indigo on the other PC, too. The problem happens even when I'm not playing audio, but I notice it alot more when audio is playing, since audio gapping is the most obvious symptom.

One thing I neglected to mention is that I'm driving an external monitor and operating the Dell with the lid shut. I opened the lid and used the internal LCD screen, but unfortunately I just got the problem again. I'll disable the internal sound and see if that helps things.

spiderprod wrote:there is only 32 meg of video so that might be the problem .

have you tweaked window? if not try this link
http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/supertweaks.htm

Thank you for this link... my XP machine at work has been hurting recently.

It could be the Indigo I/O. Disable your onboard sound and see what happens. If it still freezes, disable the Indigo and enable the onboard sound. You could always set up some different hardware profiles, set up one to use only the Indigo, and set up another for only onboard sound when you need to use that.