Strange activity with some tracks

a good first thing to try is to increase your latency and then check to see if the problem gets better.

How fast is the hard drive? 4,200, or 5,400 RPM?

The reason I asked, is my cousin had a similar issue with a new laptop he purchased. After a long ordeal with tweaking everything else, we finally came down to the slow @$$ hard drive.

In testing further, we brought in a 7200 USB 2.0 HD and compared its performance against the onboard 4200 drive.

While testing, we realized that the USB drive was exhibiting none of what we witnessed with the onboard drive. So needless to say, that drive was bumped for a 5400 drive (purchased from newegg) and a USB 2.0 drive was used for the audio drive.

the hard drive light goes on and off repeatedly.

This is normal for any drive, but the jittering you're getting is no doubt due to the slowness of the drive paired with too little ram. This was also a necessary tweak, opting to up the RAM to 1GB made a mega difference in itself. Your laptop is good to go in this area.

Getting the 5400 RPM drive was my cousin choice, seeking to knock out all possible kinks. But sending all audio to the much faster USB drive was a must and I'd say you'd be better off investing in one as well. It will save you alot of fuss, I assure you.

Thanks for that answer LabDog - appreciate the time - I will have to confirm what the drive speed is (pretty sure it is 4200) and look to replacing that - is that an easy operation - I have never owned a laptop before.

I was already playing with the idea of getting a usb2 external drive, just have to wait for some money to appear

Any of you .INI tweakers know any settings which may help with a slow drive (even slightly)

Thanks again

Rich

cheers LabDog,

I did reduce the undo levels to 32, might even go further as I rarely seem to undo more than 4-5 events, might reduce to 16

will give the other seetings a go as well.

Still strange why the tracks play ok tho, yet the idle time gets effected.

Hey ho!!

thanks for your help

Rich

Actually I don't know that I'm seen a 7200RPM internal drive made for a laptop, the highest there are seem to be 5400's. When I mentioned using a 7200, I was referring to the USB 2.0 external hard drive.

Still, a drives heat sig is solely up to how that manufacturer made the drive, i.e. reports of certain drives of the same class running a lower or higher temps than others.

We replaced the 4200 in this laptop with a 5400 purchased from Newegg. The reasoning for it was to lessen the internal drives impact on the external USB 2.0. In my opinion, that was an overkill move, but my cousin choose to rule out all weak links as much a possible. It makes sense, but it's still overkill...

This is still a strange occurrence for me - it is the only package that does this, 3d software, games (admittedly I haven't tried another music package as I don't have one )

Reason and ProTools M-Powered were the problem software on this side, so the answer is you're not alone.

Laptops can be useful for this kind of work, but generally they aren't made to be as adept as Desktop PC's are, and require even more tweaks to do this kind of work on.

LabDog

Labdog - cheers for the quick responses!!!!

You can def get 7200 internal drives, there aren't many tho. I do use freeze for tracks, looks like I will have to use it more often than before, which ain't no big deal.

Thanks labdog, appreciate the help.

rich

ORIGINAL: cb8rwh

Hi Rabeach,

yeah I have the latency set to 350ms - the track plays fine just when idle the problem occurs.

Cheers

rich

350ms is TOO high. Try 20ms just to see how that goes. And increase your OPTIONS->AUDIO->ADVANCED i/o buffers to at least 256, but also try 512.