I know practically nothing about laptops but I know enough to record my tunes which keeps me happy. That said, after a new install of XP (Yep, still using it) my version of Acid 6 seems to struggle with more than 15 tracks and a few effects. It's a 1.5Ghz Centrino with a paltry 512mb of ram. Would there be a noticeable improvement in performance with more ram? I mainly use the laptop for recording classical guitar so normally there is no problem with the amount of tracks - maybe only 4 at the most. But on the occasions I use more tracks it's a pain and I don't want to buy another laptop because this old Acer works fine for my purposes - up to a point

Thank you

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www.keithfrazer.com

After the re-install, did you re-apply the usual XP tweaks for audio?

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An Eagle for an Emperor, A Kestrel for a Knave.

Yep, turned everthing off that wasn't necessary.

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www.keithfrazer.com

Yes it would benefit from some more RAM. 512MB is not a lot when you consider that the onboard graphics is going to be nibbling away at that - antivirus assuming you're running any will take another chunk and everything else has to run in that small amount of space. If you were to go to a GB then i think you'd see some benefit. It wouldn't be that you could run loads more tracks but the whole system would have more space in which to do things and wouldnt get so clunky so quickly. If you get hold of CPUZ it will tell you what RAM you have - probably 2x 256MB and you could get 2x 512MB from Scan or somewhere and replace it. http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/cpu-z.html

Hope that helps
Robin

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PC-Music.com hints, tips & reviews
Rain Computers UK - Creative Audio PC's

Hi Keith!

I'd agree with Robin – 512MB is really scraping in at the bottom end.

1GB is probably the bare minimum for audio work, and preferably a bit more if it can be fitted into your laptop

Oh, and just in case you've missed anything, here's a link to my SOS “XP Tweaks For Music: The Audio Tweaks That Work - And The Ones That Don't!”

www.soundonsound.com/sos/sep06/articles/pcmusician_0906.htm


Martin

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YewTreeMagic

Would there be any benefit in running an external usb 2.0 drive?

I ask because I had an old 850mHz HP laptop with just 512 of ram and that ran 2 tracks at 24bits 44.1kHz fine but little more.
The laptop is no more, screen was smashed but I still have the 4port usb cardbus expander (I bet that Acer has but one, usb 1.1 port?) you are welcome KJF to borrow said card and we can dikker if it helps?

Dave.

Did you set up a fixed size page file? I assume from what you are saying that it slowed down after the re-install and given the small memory, seems like this would be the first thing to check.

Quote damoore:

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Did you set up a fixed size page file? I assume from what you are saying that it slowed down after the re-install and given the small memory, seems like this would be the first thing to check.

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I'm afraid that's a bit of a fallacy da

If you initially make the page file too small, Windows may increase its size at an inopportune moment during recording, and ruin an otherwise perfect take.

However, if you've only got a modest amount of RAM, the main limitation as far as the Windows XP page file is concerned is when your system RAM is fully utilised and then one (or more) of your applications needs yet more RAM, resulting in some of its existing contents being farmed out to your hard drive to make way for it.

Giving your page file a fixed size won't avoid this I'm afraid


Things that may help those running out of RAM are:

1. Adjusting soft sampler buffering to reduce RAM consumption in favour of more CPU load.

2. If you've been doing a lot of song editing, try saving your song, closing your sequencer, and then relaunching it and reloading your song. If you've been making lots of edits and trying lots of soft synths, Windows may be caching unused data that will be released using this method.

3. However, the easiest way to release RAM is to choose different soft synths — some can need only a few MB per instance, while others can swallow 100MB a time!


Martin

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YewTreeMagic

Martin, can I ask a sort of related question? That of the benefit of a second internal hard drive.

I read of a guy with an otherwise potent PC, i7. 8G ram, 1TB drive, running out of steam after only 25tracks or so.

The answer he got was "get a second drive". However I have read that a modern, SATA drive can handle OS, DAW, stream a shedload of tracks, make the tea...di da...
The response to this was. "Yes but, having to zip about all over the disc means that the drive cannot keep up after a relatively few tracks"*. But! (hang on, nearly done!) I am SURE that you have written that practically all the OS and DAW files are shunted into ram and the disc is virtually free to run the audio?

*If this were true then even the most lavishly specc'ed laptop would be restricted to ~30tracks max since AFAIK they only ever have one hard drive.

Bottom line. I suspect the guy has another problems that a second drive (I do understand the other, "eggs in two baskets" benefits of a second drive) will not fix?

Dave.

Quote Martin Walker:

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Things that may help those running out of RAM are:

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And whilst all are fair and valid points it has to be noted further to what Martin was saying that a fully stripped back install of Windows XP itself will eat up 200MB - 300MB sat doing nothing... hell given the option on a stock install, it'll use double that with ease to get things running smoothly, which means the is potentially more system data sat in your swap file than you have memory right now and this for performance is a rather bad thing expecially on an older system (unless you've retro fitted an SSD to cache too).

It's odd that it's slowed down after a re-install and other than perhaps before the reinstall OP had the swapfile set up locked to the fastest portion which would have given him a far better read speed from the drive and maybe it isn't now. Also mechanicals also tend to slow down with age (well they have to spend more time navigating dead sectors) which could also be a factor... which I also suppose still doesn't really fully explain it but anyhow...

Where am I going with this... err yeah, back to the point, at the moment another 512MB would cost a tenner and I suspect would have a sizable impact on your user experience at this point so probably worth a punt.

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ScanProAudio & 3XS Audio Systems
ScanProAudio Blog

Quote ef37a:

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Martin, can I ask a sort of related question? That of the benefit of a second internal hard drive.
...But! (hang on, nearly done!) I am SURE that you have written that practically all the OS and DAW files are shunted into ram and the disc is virtually free to run the audio?

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Hi Dave,

Yes, I did some tests on this aspect some years ago, and at the time noticed very little hard drive activity due to the sequencer application - nearly all of the drive activity was down to streaming in the various audio tracks. You can read it here, in the box entitled 'Windows Acitivity':

www.soundonsound.com/sos/may05/articles/pcmusician.htm

Here's the relevant screenshot:

http://media.soundonsound.com/sos/may05/images/pcmusician7.l.jpg

where the audio hard drive activity is the yellow trace, the pale green one is sample streaming, and the dark blue one is Windows C: activity over a couple of minutes.


As for the single hard drive managing more than a couple of dozen tracks, the last time I tried this was in SOS July 2005, when I managed a massive 76 24-bit/96kHz tracks on a single 7200rpm Seagate Barracuda SATA 80GB ST380013AS audio drive:

www.soundonsound.com/sos/jul05/articles/pcmusician.htm#3


Modern drives are even more capable, so unless you anticipate needed more tracks than this then a single drive is perfectly adequate


Martin

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YewTreeMagic

As others have suggested, bringing your installed RAM up to 1 or 2 GBs will likely help.

Also, replacing your present hard drive (likely an older 5400 rpm model) with a newer higher capacity one (possibly even a faster 7200 rpm model) may help. Current higher capacity notebook drives have higher areal density and can stream data onto and off the disk somewhat better than older drives.

A further option might be a faster cpu (old Centrino cpus go for cheap).

But don't expect wonders. I still use a Centrino notebook (915 chipset) which I've upgraded as above (2GBs, 500GB HDD and 2.2 GHz cpu) as well as running an HTPC with overclocked Centrino cpu 1.6 > 2.4 GHz) and there are certainly limits on performance compared to more modern multi-core notebooks.

My upgrades were done fairly inexpensively, so worth it at the time. Nowadays, with new notebook and netbook prices so low, I might go for new instead (my Centrino notebook converts into a pen tablet/slate, and new prices for those were much higher at the time).

Quote Goddard:

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As others have suggested, bringing your installed RAM up to 1 or 2 GBs will likely help.

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And, really, all other suggestions are pointless until this has been done. It's cheap and simple. Let's hear how the system behaves with the extra memory in. Have you done it yet?

Quote Exalted Wombat:

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And, really, all other suggestions are pointless until this has been done. It's cheap and simple. Let's hear how the system behaves with the extra memory in. Have you done it yet?

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Ah, but Keith has already mentioned that his memory is limited, so he's probably forgotten


Martin

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YewTreeMagic