Ableton Forum

After years of struggling with an old version of Fruity Loops on a crappy PC, I recently got a new laptop which I figured would be powerful enough to run Live 6.

Turns out it doesn't run very well at all. During playback, the interface runs at about 3 frames per second.

I'm hoping to get a USB keyboard / controller with ASIO sound drivers soon (currently using on-board soundcard and ASIO4ALL) - should I expect this to make a significant difference?

Thanks in advance!

A keyboard controller will not improve Live's playback power at all.

A keyboard controller with a built-in soundcard can improve Live's functionality (over built-in soundcard) tremendously.

not all soundcard drivers are built equally. Some will perform better than others.

Thanks laird

I reckon I'm gonna get a Novation X-Station - my brother has one and it'd be useful to have similar kit as we collaborate a lot and he uses the Novation's synth sounds on a fair few tracks.

Ableton runs significantly better on his much lower-spec laptop than on mine, so I figured the Novation may have a hand in that...

Anyway, that's the answer I was hoping for before splashing out £300+ on one!

The only other difference is his OS is XP Home SP2 whereas mine is Vista Home Basic - but let's not open that can of worms again (unless you can argue a good case why I'd genuinely benefit from rolling it back to XP Pro!)

Do you have aero turned on?

Hey mate,
I did the same - Bought a good Laptop with Vista on thinking it would run fine.
Well I was a noob (possibly still am) so didn't know any better.
Anyway what I have found to be useful is switching Vista to it's most basic visual settings (mine now looks like Win95, all grey and shit) by going to the performance settings in control panel and setting it for optimal performance forgetting all the fancy stuff.
I've lost all if the nice Vista stuff but my Live works loads better. Also make sure that unnecessary programs aren't running in the background.

I disagree. Search the forums and you'll find many other folks will think that's not such good advice, either.

for instance: http://www.ableton.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=81821

With Vista and live 7.01/7.02 turn Aero on, do NOT use the windows classic look under the windows display control panel. You will improve your performance dramatically. Especially if you use Spectrum or any other graphics-"intensive" plugins.

There's a bunch of other stuff you can do... turn off wireless networks, turn off power saving mode, turn off the sidebar.

I've got Live 7.01 working great under Vista, but my soundcard has great drivers (presonus)... hopefully you (the OP) can too.

Maybe every PC is different but after trying again with Aero and suffering constant glitches I think classic look is better. Advice to those interested: Don't buy Toshiba.