Help us help you - what you need to know before posting!
 

Thank you for taking the time to read this before posting - you're already ahead of the game! By reading and following the information provided here, you'll have the best chance of getting your questions answered quickly and completely.

First, keep in mind that this is the USER Conference - meaning it's mostly other Pro Tools users that will be answering your questions. While Digidesign Tech Support maintains a presence here, with the hundreds of posts per day here on the DUC, we are unable to chime in on every one. We maintain limited hours of operation here, so many posts are bound to happen when we are not available.

Before making a post, we ask that you take the time to do a SEARCH of the DUC, as it is likely that your question or problem has been addressed previously.

In addition, we ask that you go through the respective Setup and General Troubleshooting sticky at the top of the forum appropriate for your OS and hardware before posting, as a vast majority of problems can be solved by properly optimizing and 'cleaning out' (by trashing preferences, databases, etc.) your system. Here are the links to the respective threads:

Pro Tools HD on Windows

Pro Tools LE and HD on Mac

Pro Tools LE on Windows

Pro Tools M-Powered on Mac

Pro Tools M-Powered on Windows

To enable Digidesign Technical Support and other users to assist you with your problem, PLEASE provide a complete system profile as well as a complete description of the problem you're experiencing, including the exact text and error numbers in any error messages you're gettting. When writing your post subject heading, make sure it's an accurate description of the problem you're having. It's better to write something like 'DAE Error 9073 when playing back on 002R' than 'HEEEELLLLPP!'. It will make identifying the urgency of your problem more apparent, as well as aid others when doing a search for previously reported issues.

At the very least, we need the following information:

Computer model and processor speed
OS version
Pro Tools version
Amount of RAM installed
Any attached peripherals (hard drives, video devices, other firewire or USB devices that may be attached, etc)
Number and type (firewire, SATA, SCSI, etc) of drives installed
A concise list of the troubleshooting you've already tried - please be as specific as possible! The first thing we'll ask is 'Have you done everything in the Setup and General Troubleshooting thread?', so we'll want to know that you've done ALL of it and, if you've not done everything, we need to know what you have or have not done, as this can have a huge impact on further troubleshooting.

WinXP users should provide a Sandra report, as indicated in the Setup and General Troubleshooting thread (information on how to download Sandra and generate the report is included in those threads).

The more information you can provide, the easier it will be for Tech Support and other users to assist you - take the time now to document everything you can and you'll save time in the long run.