Quote Achtern Styg:

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Hei, guys. I am back with some more info on my new Dell Inspiron 1525.

The conclusion (if you wanna skip reading the rest of this message) is NOT TO GET AN INSPIRON 1525 for music production.

I have tried both Vista and XP SP2 or SP3. The problem is that the DCP latencies are not low enough to run a ASIO driver with low enough latency for real time midi playing. Namely, using DPC latency checker tool, in Vista the average latencies are around 500 micro-seconds, where as in XP they are around 190 micro-seconds, which is not too bad. ( My older Inspiron 6400 , XP SP2, stays flat at 40-50 microseconds). THE actual problem is that every now and then, there are red spikes and yellow spikes on top of the smooth green background. The red spikes I managed to trace back to the wireless card, a crappy Dell 1395 WLAN MiniCard. When I disable the card (from the Device Manager, or rightclick on the wireless icon in the right hand of the taskbar->Disable) , the red spikes go away. Nevertheless, the yellow spikes, as big as 1-2 ms, come about 2-3 every 30 seconds and spoil my attempts to run at latencies as low as 64-128 buffersize , equivalent to a total of 5-7 ms at 96000kHz. This is a pitty, as this laptop seems otherwise quite promising. I could not find any culprit for these yellow spikes, I tried to disable most of the components, turned off a lot of windows services, etc.
One can also hear pops when playing an mp3 in winamp, completely correlated to spikes seen in the DPC checker.

Hope this helps. I am trying either to get a refund on my 2 day old machine, have my motherboard changed or otherwise pray for a quick release of a new BIOS version, if they track down and fix the problem. Dell Tech support has been informed.

Achtern Styg

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I have an inspiron 1520 and by installing the fan control utility mentioned elsewhere in this thread, setting the fan speed to manual and choosing the high speed setting I got rid of those spikes. Works flawlessly.

Hi, guys. So, more news.
1) Nuno, of course the fan utility was tried few times with no success. It doesnt actually manage to control the fan. Even more, it doubles the average DPC latencies (the green background).

What really proved to be a breakthrough in my case was removing the damn battery (9 cell). Not disabling it in the Device manager, but actually removing it. This removes most of the DPC yellow spikes.

So, to recap, so far I have: disabled the Wireless card (1395 dell)->red spikes gone, disabled the onboard sound card (sigma) and remove the battery phyiscally ->more yellow spikes are gone. This leaves me with very low green background ( around 30 micro-seconds) and one single yellow spike coming regularly every 32 seconds. WHYYYYYYYYY?????????? )) I have been trying to understand why this is so. I am almost there, although my comp is becoming an empty box. I have been reading on threads about Gigabyte motherboards of people with similar problems which were ultimately solved by a new BIOS update.

For all of you who have Ableton Live, open a project, go to Properties/Audio and turn on the Tone sound, with processor simulation to 80% (maximum allowed in Ableton 6). Then listen to any crackles coming through the sine wave sound. They will correspond to actual spikes in the DPC checker, even when these spikes are still within the green zone. It's incredible. Disable different components until you get a clean sound with 80% CPU simulation. Do all this on as low as possible buffer size.

Quote Achtern Styg:

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Hi, guys. So, more news.
1) Nuno, of course the fan utility was tried few times with no success. It doesnt actually manage to control the fan. Even more, it doubles the average DPC latencies (the green background).

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With mine using the fan thing in automatic mode also made things worse, but in manual mode and setting the fan to high speed works fine.

Hey! I'm new here, but have been reading sos for 10 years or so. After getting a new laptop and reading this thread and the article in print I donwloaded the tool and got some great results.

Specs: ASUS s96s laptop. WinXP SP2. Dual core 2,2 Ghz Intel. 4 GB Ram. Intel PM965 chipset. Echo Audiofire 4 soundcard.

My latency was great. Typically about 30 microseconds. But I had peaks up to 4000 every 45 seconds or so. I started disabling stuff and found that my DVD drive was the culprit. Disabling it gave me straight 5 to 25 microseconds performance. No peaks whatsoever. Whenever I need to install something or burn something I just turn the drive on again.


Note: I modded/configured my laptop quite heavily for good ASIO performance:

- disable everything that says bleutooth.
- Get a silent drive, Samsung HM160HI
- Tweak Windows for performance (disable all fancy graphic etc.)

I now have a rocksolid laptop with great audio performance. Cost me about 950 euros.

Hi

I am investigating an apparent problem with P4 processor(s) and it may have a bearing on your forums relating to latency spikes

I was recently evaluating a P4 based board for our in-house realtime O.S and had problems with mysterious time gaps. The system works Ok with pentium & P3 Celeron boards but they are going obsolete hence the P4

After a bit of digging (2 weeks work ) I think that the problem is that the processor sometimes 'stalls' when executing an Input instruction (hope you know what I mean by an Input instruction) for a 'long' time. Checks on a variety of P4, and variants, PCs shows that this can be 100s of microseconds

Now for the bit that may interest you & your forumites. I was playing with an old Dell Dimension 4400 this weekend and found that turning off the USB in the BIOS cleared the problem. Sadly when I tried it at the office today on other PCs I found that it would fix the problem on some PCs but only reduce it on others. My point is that disabling devices in Device Manager may not be sufficient, it may be worth disabling the devices in the BIOS as well

By the way I have not yet managed to reproduce this apparent problem on any AMD processors

Hope this is of use and doesn't just muddy the waters

Welcome to the SOS Forums Steve, and thanks for the info!

I suspect some older PCs did have 'dodgy' USB implementations that could result in significant DPC spikes.

It also doesn't surprise me that some hardware devices still cause problems even when disabled in Device Manager, yet the problem is resolved once they are disabled in the BIOS so Windows doesn't see them at all.


Martin

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YewTreeMagic

2.2GHz Acer 6592 laptop, 2Gb Ram, 5400rpm harddrive.

Spent many hours collecting a list of all the tips to get it to work reliably with sound with reasonable success (see next post).

Used the latency checker after reading about it yesterday.

Had spikes every 5 seconds of 4000us

It turned out to be my infrared port - which I don't use.
Disabled it and my laptop has a clean bill of health for sound. Fabulous

Here is a list of all the tips I gathered to get a Windows laptop set up for music recording. I hope it saves others a lot of time.

Setting up a PC laptop for audio recording
Hardware Notes

1 Minimum laptop spec. 2GHz processor, 2GB Ram, 5400rpm Hard Drive (7200rpm 10ms avg. seek time preferable).
Many interfaces claim that 1Ghz, 512Mb Ram and 4200rpm will suffice. In general the lower the spec. the sooner problems will occur and the lower the number of tracks you will be able to record simultaneously.
For recording without simultaneous playback or mixing without the use of multiple sound modifying plug-ins a slower computer such as a 1GHz should be OK provided that the interface and drivers are all compatible and the matters below are dealt with.
The list below are all the things I tried to get a 2.2GHz Acer 6592, 2Gb Ram, 5400rpm to work with a Firewire interface running only two simultaneous recorded tracks. Ultimately this laptop specification was fine to record 8 simultaneous tracks while playing back more than 16 tracks once the settings were made and a good quality interface was selected.

2 Ensure Firewire/USB cables are high quality, ultra/high speed cables with good shielding and firmly fitting plugs. It is possible for all your problems to be caused by a poorly manufactured cable using incorrectly tolerance plugs and the wrong quality of wire, insulation and shielding – (eg many cables available from retail electronics shops). If you can’t use the cable that was supplied with your interface because of plug incompatibility (eg mini 4 pin Firewire socket instead of full sized 6 pin socket) make sure the substitute is of equivalent or better quality or get a PCMCIA adaptor card with full sized sockets so you can use the original.

3 Cable length should be as short as possible – capacitance per metre is an issue.
Maximum cable length USB 2 = 5 metres
Maximum cable length Firewire 400 = 4.5 metres
Beware of pushing to this limit if you have recording problems with the original short cable supplied.

4 There are potential functionality issues with Firewire in XP (Service Pack 2) – It may only be running at 100MB per second – see Microsoft website. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/885222
This appears to only affect Firewire B plugs (800 MB/s)
Firewire (A) 400 MB per second should be OK.
Apple laptop computers/operating system now have the capability of 800 MB per second Firewire. This is less common on PC laptops but you should be able to get a PCMCIA adaptor card.

5 USB 2 is 480 MB per second.
USB 2 interfaces may work more successfully on a PC laptop than Firewire. (eg ZOOM H4 USB2 interface recording 2 tracks simultaneously worked perfectly first time.)
However USB uses more processor resources than Firewire (14% vs 3%) and ultimately will record less simultaneous tracks than a functioning Firewire 400 setup.

6 If you are still having problems try an interface from a completely different manufacturer. There are significant differences in the quality of hardware and software (drivers etc.) between the different manufacturers. A MOTU 8 Pre was able to write 8 simultaneous tracks of 24bit 96kHz audio perfectly to the laptop spec in Item 1 first time while playing back 16 or more previously recorded tracks (all laptop settings as in points 2 – 19). A Presonus Firebox was unable to write two error free 44.1KHz tracks under the same settings.

7 It is possible to use an external Firewire or USB2 drive to record your audio to (such as the Maxtor One Touch III Firewire). Ensure that the drive speed is 7200rpm or better. Use a high quality cable. Check that the record rate of the drive is at least equivalent to your internal drive (eg say 35Mb per sec). Speed checking utilities are available on line such as HD Tune http://www.hdtune.com. eSATA drives are now available as external back-up drives. These should be much faster, but check the specs before you buy.


Preparing the laptop
Must do
1 Control Panel - Display - Screen Saver - None - Apply.

2 Control Panel - System - Advanced - Error Reporting - Disable.

3 Control Panel - Power Options - Always On.
Control Panel - Power options - Monitor - Never Off - Apply.

This step is both to ensure that your notebook doesn’t power-down during a session and also to ensure that the CPU speed is not downgraded as a power conservation method. Use a CPU speed utility to check if you are unsure that you’ve completely disabled this feature.

4 Control Panel - Sounds/Audio - Sounds - No Sounds - Apply.

This is both intended to prevent unintentional corruption of recordings by sounds interrupting recording internally or by being picked up by your mics externally, and to guard against the sample rate of your sound card being switched by a sound file during recording.

5 My Computer - Right Click -
Properties - Hardware - Device Manager -
Double Click IDE ATA/ATAPI - Double Click Primary IDE Controller - Advanced Settings - DMA if Available.

Repeat for Secondary IDE Controller.

6 My Computer - Right Click - Properties - Advanced - Performance - Settings - Advanced Tab - Processor Scheduling - Background Services.

7 Disable Virus Protection software.
Make sure that virus program is not running Auto Update of software.

8 Make sure that computer is not running a scheduled system Virus Scan in background.

9 Disable Windows Firewall on 1394 protocols (Network Access).
Control Panel - Network Connections - double click 1394 Connection - Properties - Advanced - Windows Firewall Settings - Off
Disable Windows Auto-updates. (Control Panel - System)

10 Turn off Wireless Communication.
Start Menu - Control Panel - double click Network Connections - right click Wireless Network Connection - Disable.

11 Disconnect computer from Local Network.

12 Disable Taskbar auto-hide.
Taskbar right click - Properties - un-tick 'Auto-hide the Taskbar'

13 Turn off System Restore on all drives
Control Panel - System - System Restore - Turn off System Restore on all drives - Disable.


Could do
1 Control Panel - Display - Themes - Windows Classic - Apply.
Control Panel - Display - Desktop - Background - None.
Control Panel - Display - Appearance - Effects - All Off.

2 My Computer - Double Click - CD Drive Right Click - Properties - Auto Play - Music Files - ‘Prompt Me Each Time’.

Repeat for all CD file types.

3 If laptop has mini-Firewire plug only, add PCMCIA Firewire Adaptor with full sized plugs.
(May not be essential but this will enable you to use the original cable supplied with the interface). Make sure that the interface has a Texas Instruments chipset.
For a discussion on which PCMCIA cards work with which interfaces read:
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/dec06/articles/pcnotes_1206.htm

4 Check the wattage required for any device you attempt to power directly from a 6 pin Firewire plug. Your laptop power supply (or battery) may not have sufficient power to reliably run the device. Use the supplied AC adaptor for the device to reduce power drain on your computer or in some cases you can plug an AC adaptor into your PCMCIA card to provide power for the Firewire chain.

5 Defragment the drive that you are writing audio to before each project.

6 Check the interface manufacturer’s website for a more recent driver or software update.



Running the audio software

1 Check that your monitoring method in your software is not software intensive – eg Tape Monitor in Cubase – use hardware monitoring options.

2 Increase Buffers to maximum – start with lowest specification (most latency) in all hardware settings and step up through them until drop outs are evident.
EG in Cubase in the Device Setup/VST Multitrack/Expert Settings box set Audio Priority to ‘Very High’, time to 2 Seconds, and uncheck each of None Buffered Read, None Buffered Write, Lower Latency, and Multi Processing. Set the number of disk buffers to 12; set disk buffer size to 128 or 256; and click "APPLY".

3 Latency – the delay as a signal passes through your software and hardware - is only a problem if you are trying to sing or perform while monitoring your performance in real time or performing to other instruments being processed by your computer in real time. Recording new tracks without any need for performers to interact with the recorded material can be done without needing to minimize latency. Mixing down already recorded tracks can also be done without minimizing latency as the only effect is to create a slight lag when software controls are operated.

4 ASIO buffer size of 64 samples = latency of 1.5ms (extremely low). 3ms is a more suitable figure to aim for. Most musicians are happy with 6ms or more. You can increase latency to 12ms or 23ms (1024 samples at 44.1kHz) while mixing down to let you run a few more plug-ins. It is not recommend to increase buffer size beyond 1024 samples. Start with a 256-sample (or 6ms at 44.1kHz) buffer size.

5 FirePod and FireBox only: Right click on your PreSonus interface icon in your system tray just to the left of the time. Set the CPU setting to HIGH. If HIGH setting does not improve performance, try LOW.


Testing Tips

A quick way to test recording stability of an interface is to record a fast drum beat (160bpm) from a drum machine. Any drop outs in a single track played back are obvious as missed beats.

You don’t necessarily have to feed a signal to each of the multiple tracks you are trying to record simultaneously. For example – if you are trying to test the ability of an interface with the ability to record 8 tracks simultaneously you can enable all eight tracks for recording, feed a signal to tracks 1 and 8, and allow the other 6 tracks to record silence. All eight tracks should produce files of equal size, and any drop-outs will be evident on the two tracks with recorded information.

Recording an identical drum beat to many tracks (starting the record process at random) and playing them back while the next track(s) are being recorded creates a complex layered drum beat. Any read or write drop out on any of the tracks instantly changes the rhythm of the multiple beat even if the discontinuity would not have been audible in a recording of a random signal like voice or guitar.

Edited by Icarus (23/07/08 01:46 AM)

Well I have two computers, old and new...

OLD: Gateway Select 750, AMD Athlon 750 MHz CPU, XP 32bit Home
two 5400 RPM hard drives, 256 MB RAM... from 2000-2001

NEW: Gateway GT5622, Intel dual core 1.8 GHz CPU(s), Vista 32bit Home
two 7200 RPM hard drives, 3 GB RAM... from this year

XP Home (comes with SP2) has just been installed and activated on the old computer, and no optimization tweaks have been applied to it yet, except for disabling disk indexing.

Vista Home Premium came preinstalled on the new computer. I have struggled a lot with this new computer to get it optimized for audio. I have disabled lots of services and devices, indexing, and even recently disabled SuperFetch, PreFetch, ReadyBoost, ReadyBoot, and ExecutivePaging. This has resulted in Vista finally overworking the hard drive a bit less, but it's still busy writing to the hard drive when it should be idle.

Both computers are kept virus and malware free, and both computers are not connected to the internet. Both computers have defragged NTFS hard drives. Unneeded Windows programs/components were removed from each computer. M-Audio Audiophile 2496 PCI soundcards are installed in both computers. I tend to use the same soundcard buffer settings in both computers: Something like around 1024. Both computers use the same screen resolution of 1152 x 864 at about 75Hz.

I'm currently in the process of installing the same programs onto the older computer to make it nearly identical to the new one. So far, I've only installed about 5 programs on it.

The older computer runs surprisingly well, since everything about it is technically slower: USB, CPU, FSB, hard drives. It also has a lot less RAM.
This older computer is too slow to even install a DVD-RW burner in because it's FSB and CPU speed is too low! Luckily, XP Home comes on CD-ROM and it's system requirements are meager, so the XP Home installation and configuration was easy.

Today I just happened to install DPClat.exe on the old supposedly slow computer and noticed that it's statistics are almost identical to the new supposedly fast computer. Both computers stay focused in the green zone at about 100, indicating that dropouts should not be a problem.

However, the newer computer (GT5622) has irregular spikes into or just below the yellow about every 10-20 seconds, whereas the older computer (Select 750) doesn't! The older computer thus far is actually more reliable in this test!

I haven't yet done any recording on the old computer since I installed XP on it. But it was very stable and glitch-free when it ran Windows 98 SE optimized for audio with those same 5400 RPM hard drives.

In contrast, the new computer with Vista and with optimization tweaks has been subject to frequent stuttering-interrupted audio recordings! This newer computer also scores low in Window Experience indexes, because of the built in Intel graphics hardware. The older computer has some kind of PCI graphics card I think.

It will be interesting to see how the old computer holds up after I install the complete set of audio programs I intend to use on it. But so far, so good.

So you CAN teach an old dog new tricks!

Quote Icarus:

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2.2GHz Acer 6592 laptop, 2Gb Ram, 5400rpm harddrive.

Spent many hours collecting a list of all the tips to get it to work reliably with sound with reasonable success (see next post).

Used the latency checker after reading about it yesterday.

Had spikes every 5 seconds of 4000us

It turned out to be my infrared port - which I don't use.
Disabled it and my laptop has a clean bill of health for sound. Fabulous

---

Last night I had time to do a test of the laptop.
I was able to daisy chain my drummer's Presonus Firepod with a Presonus Firebox for 12 simultaneous error free recorded tracks while playing back 24. A miracle!

Previously I could not even reliably record one track with a Presonus device. (Whereas Motu interfaces and USB2 devices worked fine.)

While mucking around I also discovered that the laptop worked perfectly when plugged into its power supply - but when I switch to battery the battery management driver once again creates havoc with processor priority. All this can be seen easily with the Latency Checker.

The annoying thing is that most of the things I had spent hundreds of hours finding to fix the PC before (see my earlier post) are totally unnecessary - for example, with the infrared driver turned off the laptop is quite happy to run the virus checker and the wireless network while recording.

Thanks for dpclat.exe - a useful little utility if its output is to be believed.
Currently see no reason not to believe it & will try it on my lappy later today.
Amazing the difference it makes turning stuff on and off, let alone disabling devices.
One of those things you "always knew" but nice to see it confirmed in a tangible manner!

Now - are there any opther cool little utils like this I might not know about? (grin)

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Me? But I`m such a loveable old bugger!

Hi, guys. My Inspiron 1525 saga as come to an end. I have sent the machine back, asked for a refund. In the meantime, i have ordered and received a Toshiba Satellite A200-28P (T8100, 3 Gb Ram@667) which I managed to get up and going, after quite some struggle. The DPC latency checker in XP SP3, running in ACPI mode, reports mostly an average of about 70 microseconds, maximum three hundred micro-seconds (when fan kicks in and out). I have tried the MPS multiprocessor XP instalation and it works great, much lower latency, no fan issue, but the price to pay is no ACPI related functions (is my batt. charnged? I wouldnt know) and a slightly higher CPU core ( from 49 C in ACPI mode goes up to 65 C in MPS mode). In any case, for all of those hopeless laptop owners out there, try to install XP in MPS multiprocessor mode ( read up on google about it), by pressing F5 when early in the XP setup you're demanded to press F6. It seems this is an older trick from
music producers to get more outta their machines (components tend to sit on idividual irq's in MPS mode rather than crammed together on fewer irq's in ACPI mode). If you do try MPS mode, monitor your CPU under heavy prolonged load as the fan will now keep working always, but not on the highest speed. FanSpeed is a good tool to monitor temps. I have read posts of people whose CPU's were 90 C hot ( apparently, Core2Duo T series can take more than 100 C).

Edited by Achtern Styg (26/07/08 11:38 PM)

I just got an Acer Extensa 5620-4428. Really happy with it. I just spent all night setting up a Vista/XP dualboot. DPC latency on the XP parttion says 35 micro seconds average, max 47 micro seconds. I turned off the wireless for this.

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Well, in the end Dell technical support have told me flatly that they can't deal with my problem. I find this infuriating, given that there must be a fair few other users out there who are suffering from the same problem, but they have refused to investigate it any further



Time to go laptop shopping again

My Acer Travelmate 5720 has just arrived - this is what was reported running DPC straight out of the box:



Considering this is in Vista, with everything enabled and all manner of pre installed cr*p running (which will be swiftly removed ) I think the results are promising. I get the occasional red spike, but it seems to be connected with me moving/opening windows etc in Vista rather than anything related to the laptop itself/BIOS etc. Have heard the fan kick in without any discernable effect being shown.

Question... has anyone succeeded in getting Vista down to a manageable level, or is it best to plough straight on with the XP dual boot install...

Quote Vanmartinrooy:

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My Acer Travelmate 5720 has just arrived - this is what was reported running DPC straight out of the box:



Considering this is in Vista, with everything enabled and all manner of pre installed cr*p running (which will be swiftly removed ) I think the results are promising. I get the occasional red spike, but it seems to be connected with me moving/opening windows etc in Vista rather than anything related to the laptop itself/BIOS etc. Have heard the fan kick in without any discernable effect being shown.

Question... has anyone succeeded in getting Vista down to a manageable level, or is it best to plough straight on with the XP dual boot install...

---

i've been using xp w/sp3 and it seems to be performing better than xp w/sp2.

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Fostex 812 Mixer -> MOTU 828 mk3 -> MacBook: C2D, 2.4Ghz, 4G RAM, OSX 10.6 || i7 920, 2.66Ghz, 6G RAM, Win 7 Pro -> Reaper v3.6

Quote Vanmartinrooy:

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My Acer Travelmate 5720 has just arrived - this is what was reported running DPC straight out of the box:



Considering this is in Vista, with everything enabled and all manner of pre installed cr*p running (which will be swiftly removed ) I think the results are promising. I get the occasional red spike, but it seems to be connected with me moving/opening windows etc in Vista rather than anything related to the laptop itself/BIOS etc. Have heard the fan kick in without any discernable effect being shown.

Question... has anyone succeeded in getting Vista down to a manageable level, or is it best to plough straight on with the XP dual boot install...

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I would dualboot. Vista is nice looking, but XP will out perform it for audio tasks. Here's a link to how I set up a Vista/XP dualboot on my Acer notebook: XP/Vista Dualboot It's fairly straight foward.

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Quote Vanmartinrooy:

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Question... has anyone succeeded in getting Vista down to a manageable level, or is it best to plough straight on with the XP dual boot install...

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yes, Nuno_ has posted excellent results earlier (page two or three?), as have some others.

but like so many others here, you seem to be assuming that yellow spikes automatically equal "bad performance". until you *actually* experience dropouts, DPC latency means nothing. i have results similar to yours on my laptop and run comfortably at 4ms, and never get a DPC related dropout. constant red levels are one thing, but the graph you've posted shows no problems to speak of.

i guess what i'm saying is don't create a "problem" where there is none.

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hourglass | random thoughts | doubledotdash!? collective

What? I get a very good reading on my Dell Dimension 520 when I am running Cubase studio 4, but when I close the application the meter just shows red, red, red at nearly 15000ps.

Whats's that all about. I hardly ever have problems with this computer - so why the reading when the siftware is off?

Strange.
Mr Wud

Gateway Select 750, AMD Athlon 750 MHz CPU, XP 32bit Home
two 5400 RPM hard drives, 256 MB RAM... from 2000-2001

OK I posted here earlier when I had just installed XP and things were going well on this old computer. Well here is an update.

I finished optimizing XP Home (SP2) for audio. The only thing I haven't done yet is given the computer some more RAM to work with, but that's next on the agenda, and perhaps add a faster audio hard drive (current both drives are at 5400 RPM, and the RAM is currently at 256).

Today I replaced the old 32MB NVIDIA RIVA Pro 64 AGP video card with an 8MB Generic ATI Rage XL PCI video card. Like I always do, I set the video resolution to 1152x864 @ 16bits. The new card can do 24 and 32 bits, but I can't see all those colors anyway very well and I don't have much RAM.

Good news... the DPC dropped from 100 to about 25, occassionally going up to 52 ! It's in the green zone!

In contrast, my optimized Vista computer (with built-in video) is still at 100 with peaks going up to 1000 about every 20 seconds. To put things into perspective, consider that the Vista computer has 3GB of RAM and dual cores at 1.8 GHz. The XP computer has only 256MB of RAM and one core at 750MHz! The XP computer has only USB 1.x support. Both computers have the same screen resolution and the same M-Audio Audiophile 2496 sound cards installed. Both are Gateway computers. One from 2000, the other from 2007.

Newer is not always better I guess.

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hear my music @ http://www.soundclick.com/bands/pagemusic.cfm?bandID=576070

Hi Martin and SOS team and readers - first post but have read the mag for 10 years...
dpc on my PC read between 22 and 48 steadily, absolute figure 158us with cubase LE (busy song loaded but stopped), winrar, dpc and 2 instances of firefox running. internet, spybot and avg virus all on. setting soundcard latency to 64 samples on the terratec makes no difference to dpc figures, but LE is at 70% when stopped, 40% at 256 samples. reaper seems to give much better low-latency performance, with 25+ instances of the reaper compressor running before audio breakage - heavier load than the LE song. pleased with the dual core at last, after mucho tweaking to get things working properly(the usual cubase MIDI port and Midisport 8x8 timing issues and eprom upgrades... i still got better latency performance with cubase on 1.7ghz athlon under XP, but the DC rocks for track count.


May just be able to make some music again now

happy tweaking!

john

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asus HP Pavilion,pentium d 2x2.8ghz,2g ram,2x150gb wdc hdd, win xphomesp3, cubase vst3.7/LE,e-mu 0404+terratec phase 88 pci, midisport 8x8,akai s6000,korg x5,e-mu proteus 2000,nova supernova etc

I just got a new Dell Vostro 1510 Dual core 2 and I'm having the same problem. Every 30 second the latency peaks. Nuno, are you not aware of a solution to this yet? I know I didn't buy a MAcbook pro but this is [ ****** ] up. Are you sure it has got to do with the fan? I'm sitting here all furious..

A quick update on my HP NX7400 Laptop after a recent re-install:

Spec:
HP NX7400 Laptop (2.0Ghz Core2Duo)
2GB RAM
Windows XP Pro SP3
EMU1616 SOundcard


DPC Latency is now down to 50-60 with no spikes (before it was @80-120)

The culprits were
Wireless Card
Ethernet
Modem
Wireless keyboard

I noticed that after this re-install when I clicked on an folder with Ableton running, I would get a huge spike (2500+). It turns out to related to the 'click' sound that the on-board soundcard makes when opening folders. Setting the sound scheme to 'no sounds' cured this. A common tweak, but easily overlooked (by me anyway!).

I also noticed that my wireless keyboard and mouse added another 40-50 (spikes, not steady) onto my DPC score. During a lot of mouse activity, DPC would rise to 110. Unplugging it sorted it out.

So with the wireless keyboard unplugged:

14-16 with no jumps

with Ableton running
50-60 with no jumps

Disabling the on-board sound didn't make any difference, as long as the sound scheme is set to 'none'.

Very pleased now !

As a previous poster has said - if you do work at low latency and with very CPU intensive plug-ins (using 50% + CPU), every little DPC spike means a glitch or a crackle, even if it doesn't go into the red.

I can live with a wired keyboard for the occasions when I need really low latency performance.

Quote Richulu:

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I just got a new Dell Vostro 1510 Dual core 2 and I'm having the same problem. Every 30 second the latency peaks. Nuno, are you not aware of a solution to this yet? I know I didn't buy a MAcbook pro but this is [ ****** ] up. Are you sure it has got to do with the fan? I'm sitting here all furious..

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I fixed mine long time ago. It took a bit experimenting and a few OS reinstalls but it working fine since.

You can find the details in this thread.

The fan control utility may be what you need to fix that. I found that only by setting the fan to manual control fixed it completely.

DPC Latency Checker is a tiny 310KB Windows utility, doesn't require installing (just double-click the file to run), and is really easy to use. It polls the DPC (Deferred Procedure Call) latency once every second and displays the results in a horizontally-scrolling graph. Hardware drivers issue periodic interrupts, and Windows deals with these as soon as it can on a first come first served basis (the DPC).

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Digital Signage Free scouts website

Quote sohel1:

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DPC Latency Checker is a tiny 310KB Windows utility, doesn't require installing (just double-click the file to run), and is really easy to use. It polls the DPC (Deferred Procedure Call) latency once every second and displays the results in a horizontally-scrolling graph. Hardware drivers issue periodic interrupts, and Windows deals with these as soon as it can on a first come first served basis (the DPC).

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Welcome to the SOS Forums sohel1!

I'm not sure what you're getting at though - you've just copied and pasted a paragraph from my very first post on this thread.

Did you have a query about DPC Latency Checker?


Martin

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YewTreeMagic

Hello,

I have a Fujitsu Siemens Laptop- The Esprimo Mobile V5535- 2ghz processor, 765mb ram, 5400 rpm hard drive. Vista.
Edirol Usb audio capture ua-25 sound card,
Emu X board midi controller.

Currently I can't record anything through midi, as whenever I try the sound warps and buckles and goes completely out of time, completely different to what I play onto the keyboard.
I did a thread about it and someone suggester upping the buffer size, which i tried to the maximum- no difference.
I think it's either that I don't have enough RAM (a lot of people suggest 2mb which i don't have) Or the latency.

I ran the latency test and I get a reading between 51 and 1150, and the rest of the spikes hitting random results inbetween. When I type or record this sends all the spikes into the yellow.

I tried disabling devices, but nothing seems to make a difference. I turned firewall off and windows defender.

From reading the rest of these posts it appears that most people find that the problem was vista.
I'm stuck really, and can't decide what to do. I'm not overtly technical, and I just worry that if I spend all this money and effort on downgrading then things still may not work and I don't have the technical intuation to sort things out! I'm a student and I've been trying to get a studio for ages, but it's all turned into a major major hassle. I'm trying to get it set up for september.
What would anyone advise?

Spec from CPU-z

CPU: Pentium 4 @ 3.0 Ghz (Prescott)
MOBO: Gigabyte 81848P775-G
Chipset: 848p
Southbridge: 82801 EB
FSB: 201 MHz
Bus Speed: 803.9 MHz
1 Gig PC2700 Corsair DDR RAM
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XP Pro (sp2)
Marvell Yukon Gigabit NIC
Audiophile 2496 PCI
System Drive: 80 Gig Seagate Barracuda
Media Drive: 140 Gig Hitachi Deskstar
Promise Ultra133 TX2 IDE Card with 2 more 120 Gig Seagates
2 x External USB2 250 Gig Seagate Barracudas



Low Idle: 10-14
Average: 20-40
Max: 87 (when one of the external USB drives decided to wake up)

I'm really very surprised at this what with the huge specs of some of the systems on here. The PC was originally built as a DAW but it's now used primarily as a Flash, website and Photoshop authoring workstation. I'm also running Firefox, Spyware Doctor, NIS and its host of associated background processes.

With all the talk of network adaptors slowing things down I thought I'd stream a Div-X movie across my network from the host PC and crack open my FTP software and perform a few uploads. This resulted in a higher peak of 135 and an average of around 35.

I then prompted Symantec's LiveUpdate as I know it's a really hungry process - it jumped momentarily to 195 and then calmed down again.

So it seems a higher spec system doesn't necessarily mean lower DPC timings. Groovy.

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jQuery Text-To-Speech Framework

Great forum - just what I need to get rid of annoying clicks etc that I had in the past recording on computer (I'm only part time sound engineer now). My new laptop (Dell Vostro 1710) should be much smoother for sound now.
I tried out the tool and got good improvement, but still was left with annoying peaks every 60 sec. I then disabled the battery management, and they disappeared - looks good to start recording again.
Thanks again.

No change:


Then disabled all network devices under "Network Adaptors":


Then disabled Microsoft ACPICompliant Control Method Battery, but don't know what effect this will have on the battery, though:


I had tried lots of other things, but nothing had any effect, even switching off the wireless (WI-FI & Bluetooth) using the switch on the side of the laptop.

John D.

AMD 64 3500
ASUS AV8 motherboard
3G RAM
Windows VISTA with som firewire problems
I'm geting 1000us

Home built PC(2005)- AMD 64 2800+/80Gb&120gB HDD'S/GForce FX5700/2Gb ram...
After installing XP(SP2),EMU,CUBASE etc on a suggestion (I believe in an old article by Mr.Walker )I followed the list of 'TUNING TIPS' from musicXP.net.By some of the previous posts,I wonder if everyone is aware of these.
My readings run less than 100 playing a song in Cubase,less than 30 at rest.

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Cubase LE.Emu Proteus/Emulator.ZeroG Celtic.JBL LSR25P.Gibson LP.Ibanez JS.THD Univalve.Fylde Alexander.http://www.myspace.com/catmanxbob

Quote CATMAN:

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After installing XP(SP2),EMU,CUBASE etc on a suggestion (I believe in an old article by Mr.Walker )I followed the list of 'TUNING TIPS' from musicXP.net.By some of the previous posts,I wonder if everyone is aware of these.

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Yes, I did recommend Music XP.net many moons ago, but have since compiled my own (hopefully) definitive set of Windows XP Tweaks in this feature published in SOS September 2006:

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


Martin

--------------------
YewTreeMagic

OK, here's my setup:

Asus P4P800E de luxe
Pentium 4 single core 2800
1 stick Corsair PC3200 DDR 400 512 MB
1 stick Crucial PC3200 DDR 400 512 MB
Radeon graphics (can't remember model) running 2 X 17" CRT monitors
LG CD R/W
Liteon DVD R/W
Windows PX Pro SP1
2 X Seagate Barracuda ATA 80 GB
Emu 1212m
Cubase VST 32

Results:

Typical 50 - 60 with occasional peaks of around 100. Absolute 157 using Cubase.

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Birthday Song 4 U. Personalised Birthday Songs

Thanks M for that link..

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Cubase LE.Emu Proteus/Emulator.ZeroG Celtic.JBL LSR25P.Gibson LP.Ibanez JS.THD Univalve.Fylde Alexander.http://www.myspace.com/catmanxbob

system:-
intel p4 3.0 gig processor
Asus p4c800 deluxe rev 2.0
2.0 gig memory crucial 2.5 cas
radeon 7000 graphics card.
emu 1820m soundcard.

notes:
ethernet is disabled, parallel ports disabled, serial port disable. Xp is tweaked for low services and set to favour background processes.

my latency was fully stable at 43ms no spikes, but when usb drive used small spikes occured.

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A gentleman is a man who can play "jump" on keyboards, but chooses not to


Edited by Dameo (19/08/08 03:47 PM)

I've been having a glitch problem for some time.
I downloaded the software from thesycon and found that I am
getting a single spike of 3144us, aprox. once an hour but as
yet haven't found the cause.
My computer has a Pentium (single core )3.6Ghz processor on an Intel 955xbk Mobo with 2G ram sata drives and dual 19 inch monitors.
My DAW is Soundscape with a Mixpander 5 DSP card and a UAD-1
card for FX etc...
I only have a problem when using the UAD card otherwise the
DPC spike doesn't seem to affect Soundscape.

Anyone else seeing this hourly (approx.) spike?

Welcome to the SOS Forums grahamem!

Hmm... Could it be a printer utility? Some printer manufacturers periodically check that their printer is still plugged int, or check its ink levels. Infuriating!


Martin

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YewTreeMagic

Hi Martin hmmmm I have a Primera Disc Publisher 2 connected
but the printer only seems to update ink levels during a print cycle, still it's worth a try.
What I really need is a utillity that takes a snapshot when a spike occurs and lists any processes happening because each time it happens is when I'm doing something important like burning a master CD. ( I must have loads of scrap CDRs
hiding in corners after I've thrown them in disgust.)

Grahame

Weird DPC readings after DAW application crash, what could still be wrong, and the case of the PC that speaks with forked tongue ...............

I had cause to investigate DPC meausrements after an application crash, and afterwards the audio application would not run with the soundcard's ASIO driver without dropouts. I measured the DPC peaks as over 45,000 (!) ie 45ms. Hmmmm. (well actually that was not exactly I said, but anyway ....)

So I then went to the other partition on the same machine and measured again, and found all green readings at around 250us average, and whilst playing a soundfile using Directsound with WM player, the DPC readings were doubling, i.e. around 500us.

Now this second partition was in fact my original hard drive partition, and I always liked the sound I got off this using WMPlayer (with all the EQ/SRS etc switched off).

So then began the long process of trying to find the driver that had obviously been taken down by the application crash. Anyway, after reinstalling the chipset drivers, NIC card driver, and graphics card driver, I found using RATTV3 that the main culprit was atapi.sys - so I booted into the other (E:) partition and from there replaced the disk drivers in the (C:) system32 folder and in the dll cache. I now had the DPC readings down to around 300us with a regular spike appr every 5.5 seconds of 4000 - 5000us. That is except when there was any hard disk activity whatsoever, when the whole system went absolutely ballistic with a constant DPC reading level of around 10,000us.

Nothing I did made any difference, until I found one of my original installation CDs that came with the computer - which contained the manufacturer's system software. Aha !!

So I reinstalled this software, and hey presto, the DPC spikes vanished. The measurements were all in the green, at around 300us, but on this partition (C:) no change in readings when playing an audio file. So far so good. I then reinstalled the soundcard, and played an audio file with WM Player, just as a test.

Huuuuh ??? It sounded different to how it had before the crash!! All the drivers were reading fine, DPC was fine, everything OK in Device Manager, but it sounded different.

So just in case I was imagining things, I went back to the E: drive and listed to the same file again using WM Player, and no I was not imagining things. It did sound different. The drum track I was using as a reference was now much soggier (but only in the C: drive) - mpre bass, less top. So next I went back to the DAW software and EQ'd the file to how I remeber it sounding before the crash, and it needed about 6db at 1kHz and 12 db at 20khz rsing up from about 10kHz. Now that's a lot of EQ just to get to the point where a drum track sounds like it did before a DAW app crash.

And what is bothering me now is that I have no way of knowing which is the correct playback - that from the E: drive - punchy as anything - or that from the C: drive - lots more whooomph in the bass but quite soggy overall.

But what is even more concerning about this little episode is that I could be mixing away ITB, blissfully unaware of these problems, adding my bucketfuls of EQ to get the drum track to cook again, and then if it transpires that my C: drive system is indeed still messed up (even though it now measures well from a DPC perspective), then if I render files straight from the DAW software to a WAV or MP3, then the rendering will be done AFTER I have added the EQ !!!

So really, unless you get the sound out of the little beasts in the first place, and recaptuing it, you really do have no way of knowing whether you are getting what you think you are getting. Sorry to all the forum members that see this as completely obvious, but as far as I am concerned this i something I have just discovered - and I have a major problem in my system that is affecting the sound quality coming out of it.

It is tempting to offer the standard solution which is to reformat the C: drive (after backing up the data files !!), and then I'll know it's correct. Perhaps that is true. And it is also true that there are still some tell-tale signs of the C: drive system misbehaving, which is that opening and closing windows sometimes leads to audio droputs even though the DPC checker shows no variation whatsoever. Go figure !!

I have posted this to try and shed some light on what on earth could be the problem in the system (it seems to be a system issue as the file played first with the Directsound driver and the ASIO driver does not sound right), but also to raise some awareness on this type of problem, so maybe we can all share some intelligence on this type of issue, whcih is why I believe Martin posted his request for DPC readings initially.

Before this application crash around 1 week ago, everything was relatively ok and stable.

Any comments Martin ??!!

Grahame - that's a mighty spike if it results in useless CD burns! Have you tried Process Explorer? ( http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/default.aspx )

This lets you capture CPU activity and see what process causes particular spikes.

Hope it helps!


Martin

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YewTreeMagic