Ableton Forum

I'm having major problems with my laptop when I'm using Live, it keeps "locking up" and going into hideous distortion, with completely random timing etc. it won't stop or switch off, even on very low demands e.g. playing 5 tracks of audio and 3 of midi with minimal effects it's going absolutely bonkers. My CPU hits up to 200%, and it can take a minute or more before I can turn it off. At this moment it's completely unusable. Can anyone help, please... oh, and I've got a gig next week....

Acer Aspire 1520
Athlon 64 bit processor
3400+
2.20 GHZ, 1GB Ram

Live 5.0.2

Running the latest drivers? What soundcard?

It's an m-audio firewire 410,

Could be the audiocard then, I was reading about similar issues with that card when I was looking for a new firewire based laptop audio interface. Might want to ask on thje M-Audio forums and see if others have seen this too, and how they (possibly) fixed it.

simple test to start with.

remove the 410 and every other external device and use onboard audio. try and isolate your problem. if everything is great, start adding devices in a methodical way. (overkill, but I always followt the same pattern) add device, get it recognized, restart computer, test live functionality, add next device, get it recognized, restart computer, test live functionality. so on and so forth. at least when you follow a straight forward testing procedure you don't waste time on what's working.

Now if you remove everything and it still dosen't work..........I don't know, virus check your computer, defrag, empty your caches, recreate your preferences(I've just read that others have had success, I've never done it), check you task manager to see the status of the system when failing, look at the other processes that are competing for CPU power and which can be eliminated. Not that any of the previously mentioned might help

you know all the same shit

good luck