Hi,
I just wanted a simple laptop to record stereo sound in 16 bit 48000Hz so i bought this netbook:
http://www.asus.com/Eee/Eee_PC/Eee_PC_X101CH/
I know thats not much but i only need stereo recording.
this netbook comes with windows 7 starter.
The big problem which i cannot solve for a few days now is that i get recording lags.
When i say "lags" i mean a random short mutes from time to time, it can happen once in two minutes or 3 times in 30 seconds, its random.
i can even hear it in software monitoring without start recording.

i tried to use 3 different usb soundcards, i tried to use to different recording software (cubase LE and Audacity)
I disabled everything i can in this netbook including things in the bios.

does anyone have an idea how to solve this?

Thanks

Grab DPC latency checker and show us some results : http://www.thesycon.com/deu/latency_check.shtml

I'm going to guess your picking up some nice red spikes in there when the drop outs happen, if so try disabling you lan/wifi and see if it improves.

The problem tends to be to save cash they tend to use combo controller chips for all the I/O and these don't tend to play nicely where real time audio recording is required. All you can do really is run the test see if it spikes and then start killing devices & services to see if each one being turned off helps or not.

Can I ask why you went for this as a solution rather than a decent two channel field recorder?

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ScanProAudio & 3XS Audio Systems
ScanProAudio Blog

A few things you can try:

1) In Control Panel > System and Security > System > Advanced System Settings > Performance > Advanced - make sure "adjust best performance" is set to "background services".

This should give any ASIO drivers a bit more clout.

2) My friend had a similar problem that went away when he updated his graphics card drivers.

3) Experiment with different ASIO buffer sizes - usually bigger is more reliable if you can live with the associated latency.

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When I have nothing to say my lips are sealed.

Another thing to try:

Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Power Options - select the "high performance" setting.

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When I have nothing to say my lips are sealed.

Quote Pete Kaine:

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Can I ask why you went for this as a solution rather than a decent two channel field recorder?

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I was wondering too.

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"Qui habet aures audiendi audiat"

Do you have anything else attached via the USB ports? I'd say yank everything out. Maybe try different driver types, WDM instead of ASIO just to see if it will do anything.
I had a similar problem on my old Mac with an Edirol USB card, no matter what I did it just wouldn't record properly and in my case it was a weird issue of GPU settings, background services and a slow hard drive (5200 rpm) and probably something to do with the USB port speed rate. On the other hand a firewire card worked fine so it might have had something to do with the quality of the drivers. Another thing to try would be ASIO4ALL drivers for your audio card and see if that might fix something. Go highest latency possible, lowest audio resolution you can live with (in my case 16/44.1) and kill as many background services in Windows as you can.
Sometimes lowering your graphics card settings could also help as these GPUs suck down from the ram and motherboard resources to run graphics as well.

Are you deadset on using Windows 7? It might be worthwhile to go down to XP or even Linux in your case as they can render better results. If your audio card has standard USB drivers (my Edirol does) it will be recognized under Linux.

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www.descentintomadness.com

I thinks it's sad when someone can't record a simple stereo track out the box on a PC. My ageing AW4416 was invented to do one job, but it's quite an old unit these days. When I'm now giving some consideration to getting a PC or Mac for recording, hearing stories like these gives me second thoughts.
The processing power in a modern PC is huge compared to years ago, so what's the issue?
And a 5,400rpm HDD isn't going to be causing it as it's transfer rate is way more than enough.
Windows perhaps?....that useless, cumbersome piece of nonsense......???

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Jack of all trades, master of some.