sporadic noise when recording only

[jp_dt]

I've been tweaking my laptop for the last two days. I'm running a dell latitude d505 [celeron 1.5GHz,500MB]. My interface is a FW410, and my drive is chained through the additional firewire port on the FW410. The drive has the oxford chipset. PT7 worked pretty well just installing it on my exsiting, bloated, and un-optimized os (xppro sp2). I realize my machine isn't on the "approved" list, but I thought I'd give it a try before buying a new machine one.

Since the first try, I've made another partition on the internal drive, and put a fresh install of XP pro sp2 on it. This new OS will be only for PT7. I've gone through all the suggested modifications, with the exception of disabling the ACPI, just not done yet. I've been hesitant to do all the windows upgrades, critical or not. I'm guessing that most are security patches and I'm not surfing, emailing, or networking with the new OS. Is not upgrading the OS a mistake?

So everything works great, except....random static,zippery noise, during recording. Any suggestions? It seems so close to working right.

[spkguitar]

random static,zippery noise, during recording. Any suggestions?

That, my friend, is the symptom of a celeron with PT.

I used to (try to) run an mBox with LE on a dell inspiron 1150 and it worked great for what I was doing with it (MIDI) but any attempt at serious audio would produce the "zippery" digital distortion you are describing. (sometimes raising and lowering the hardware buffer would solve the problem for me).

With the same sessions and the same mBox on a different machine, I had no problems at all
I'm just guessing here about MPowered, as I've never tried running PTMP on that particular celeron (long since got rid of the machine) but since the symptoms are so similar...

IMHO, If you want to do any serious recording, especially with PT, forget about celeron.

[jp_dt]

Do you recall what your cpu load was like on the celeron. It just seems strange that it'd be the proc when my cpu load is way down.

Thanks

[spkguitar]

CPU load was always low. It's not the load, it's how the celeron processor is designed to manage it that's the problem. They are the "light" versions of Intel processors, and they show it with CPU intensive applications like Audio, Video and Photo Processing.

[jp_dt]

I started discussing options with my co-worker today and we dicided that I hadn't worked out all possible demons with regard to my firewire configuration...chaining my drive after the FW410.... When I got home I copied a session over from my firewire drive onto the system drive. A super slow 30 gig 4200 rpm fujitsu. I was able to record and playback with no noise. Ha! I'm still testing, but this to me points out an issue with my firewire situation. I did some searching on the driver and there is a known memory hole issue with it (TI OHCI compliant 1394, by Microsoft). I'm not saying that's it for sure, but I'll keep posting.

I'm not arguing that Celeron's are better than it's other Intel counterparts, but I just can't believe that I don't already have enough processor to run pro tools, and a modest session. Will I be able to do 24+ tracks and oodles of plug ins, doubtful.

I'll keep posting with findings.

One other thing, why are so many people posting on this section with mbox setups. Is LE that similar or is the m-box/m-powered thing just confusing?

[spkguitar]

is the m-box/m-powered thing just confusing?

I think you hit the nail on the head.

It's the "M" thing.