Sonar 8.0, Dell Laptop w/VISTA and MOTU 896s Not Playing Nice

So the short of it is I cannot get my Motu 896s, Sonar 8.0 and my Dell Laptop (Vista, plenty of RAM, optimized as best I could) to run without dropouts and very noticeable latency. Based on some things I have ready and some anecdotal evidence presented by a friend with a similar issue my first instinct is to wipe my hard drive and install Windows 7. Thoughts or insights? This would be my first wipe / install - anyone have any good links or info?

Thanks much!

IIRC, Scott at ADK has reported many, many problems with most recent laptops and firewire sound cards.

The problem is in the controller as well as the chip itself.  IIRC adding a separate TI card does not always fix the problem.

agreatheight


I've got a RICOH OCHI Compliant IEEE 1394 Host Controller - is that my problem?

It could very well be your problem. I would actually put money on it,. but did you do the things in post # 2?? except for the 2nd one,as you just answered it

Thanks for the help, everyone.

Do you have the latest Motu Vista drivers? YES
Do you have a TI FW chipset card in your laptop? As above, NO.
Do you have an external 7200RPM hard drive for audio only? NO, I didn't realize I couldn't use the hd onboard. What's the story with that?
Have you tried ASIO driver mode and have you tried raising your ASIo buffers? YES.

have you checked DPC latency? I am not sure how to do that.

The Firewire chip is one issue, however as noted even that is not a guarantee that a firewire device will work with the Laptop.  I have an Acer Laptop with the Ricoh chipset, I had problems with an Alesis IO26.  I got an SIIG Firwire Express Card and it still had problems with that.  I finally gave up trying to interface and use the Laptop (I was trying to configure it for "on site" recordings).

And yet I have a DELL laptop running the Ricoh chipset with onboard Firewire and can get down to 64 samples without problems using an FF800