Vista Sound Problem

[BlindMelon7]

I bought a new laptop from PC world (don't laugh ) about 2 months ago. Its an Advent QT5500 and it has 1gb of ram, 80gb HD, a T5500 processor (which I think is why its called the QT5500) and "Mobile Intel(R) 945 Express Chipset Family" graphics.

I needed the laptop to use as a kind of "sound module" running softsynths on stage (a few of which are sample bassed so they are pretty cpu and ram intensive). I would have just bought a mac but I couldn't afford it (this thing was only £350). Anyway it HAD Vista Home Premium on it but I kept getting random cutoffs in my sound (whenever I played lots of notes). So I killed VIsta and put SP2 on it. It still does it every now and then but not as much.

Basicly I'd quite like to put vista back on it. Does anyone know how I could fix it? I tried turning almost everything off in vista and it didn't work. The wierd thing was cubase was only eating about 450mb of ram when I was playing and the processor was ticking along at 50%. I did notice that every time it did it the processor speed would increase (I presume it has some kind of "cool 'n quiet" equivelent) but I couldn't work out how to turn this off.

Thanks for reading all that

Oh yeah I forgot, the sound card is an Echo Audiofire 4.

Edit: Scratch that its an Audiofire2

[dangel]

Right click on desktop.

Choose personalize.

Choose screen saver.

Choose power settings.

Set high performance, then edit advanced settings - you can set max and min cpu for the profile. Ok everything to save the changes.

[BlindMelon7]

Thanks a lot! Do you think that will help? I thought it might just do that because something is causing it to need more power?

[dangel]

It might do - it might be the delay in the CPU speeding up causing your dropouts. I always set my laptops to run at max speed when on mains power to avoid problems with video playback etc.

Good luck

[BlindMelon7]

Thanks. I'm going to wack in the vista CD in a few minutes. I just have one more question, is there any way of making an image of my hard drive and saving it on a network drive? I'd quite like to have a backup ready in case it goes balls up and I don't have an external drive

[dangel]

See here http://forums.hexus.net/operating-sy...ton-ghost.html

for pointers on drive imaging (which is what you want)

If you've got the space, then creating another partition and dual-booting is a nice way to try another OS too (http://forums.hexus.net/operating-sy...e-my-data.html for example).

There's lots of info on here if you search a bit - especially stuff like this where people do it a lot of the time).

Commerically, I use Acronis True Image (for backups) and Acronis Disk Director Suite (for paritition management) - would recommend both

[TheAnimus]

if your getting these problems when plugged in, and whilst constantly playing video + sound, i'd suggest the cultrap could be the intel drivers, i had major issues with the ones pre-summer 2007 for the 945.

Also have a look at CPU and RAM usage, whilst your getting this stuttering problem, 1 GIG of ram is very little for this sort of thing (vista actually uses RAM almost properly!)

[BlindMelon7]

I usually have about 20% free ram and 50-80% cpu usage (when everything is running). I'm not actually playing any video. Just Steinberg Nuendo, with lots of sample players and softsynths. If it is the graphics drivers how do i fix it?

[BlindMelon7]

Oh dear. Turns out my brother has a copy of partition magic so i installed that. I think I like idea of dual booting. But when I open it up I get "error 117. partition's drive letter cannot be identified". I think its the recovery partition . I'm going to try and work out how to put the partition on my memory pen so I can delete it.

[dangel]

Partition Magic is seriously old (and no longer maintained). I'd advise somethine more up-to-date that's aware of Vista etc (see previous post).

I've just realised your posts end with Love Mellons.

Which is excellent

[BlindMelon7]

And I just realised that I spelt it wrong lol.

[BlindMelon7]

Just for an update, like everything I do in life, I gave up for lack of a valid reason to carry on (ie I couldn't see the point). Thanks for all the help though