Laptops, FireWire and system noise...

[Eric Klinger]

Hi. Just curious what you laptop guys are using for firewire ports. I have an HP Pavilion zd8390ea... quite a nice machine. It has an onboard FW400 port (4 pin)... the fw bridge chip is Texas Instruments. Currently I have the 002R plugged into there. Then I have a LaCie FW800 card in the PCMCIA slot (also TI bridge chip) with a LaCie D2 250GB for audio. I am currently experiencing some noise... strongest when I move the mouse and very annoying but not crippling to my work. All was fine last week with it... I was using my Mac G5, all I did was took a few days off and next brought in my laptop and tried... then the noise began... I haven't tried using the Mac again as it is here in my home and not at my studio... I suppose that it could be a coinsidence that the cables went bad during those two days off... but I highly doubt it. I tried the onboard fw port, then the 400 port on the LaCie card... still noisy. It is a constant buzz with tearing sounds when I move the mouse...


Any ideas?

Thanks
Eric

HP Pavilion zd8390ea
100 GB HDD
ATI Radeon x600 256MB video
2GB Kingston DDR2
Pentium 4 3.4 GHz (HT enabled in bios)
XP PRo SP 2, PT LE 7cs1
LaCie FW800/400 PCMCIA card w/ LaCie D2 Drive

[K_watchman7]

I have the same intermitent noise problem. As I move my mouse across the screen I here noises. Especially when I go over the Icons. My system is the Macbook Pro with MOTU 896mk3 on firewire. The outboard rack has a switch that sends the audio to a set of external powered speakers by Event or to the MOTU unit. Their is no noise in the powered speakers. I only hear the noise when the PC audio is sent to the motu. The clock in the Motu is set to PC internal, so I don't think clock is an issue. Please, let me know if anyone has found a cure for this type of noise. I am wondering if I should get some Carbon Beads and wrap the power cables around them. Also, just in case I don't get back to this site. Please, email me directly at [email protected] Thank you.