Pro tools 9 problems.

[antonio iannella]

Hi
I've just joined this forum in absolute desperation. I have recently put together a project home studio and decided to stick with avid gear to make configuring as easy as possible. I researched the m-box 3 and pro tools 9 system requirements and bought a new Lenovo i5 laptop with windows 7 (64-bit) and more than ample system requirements as recommended by avid.
After the initial hardship of getting it all to work, I continously experienced H/W underflow errors- buffer size problems. An easy fix according to the pop up box.
I have adjusted the buffer size, processor size, cpu percentage, set up a session in 16 bit, over and over again in various variations of increasing and decreasing settings. Tried it with only one track in the session. But it keeps stopping during recording and playback. When I set the buffer size high sometimes I can listen to a whole song with out it stopping or turning into a fuzzy distorted sound.
I'm unable to record for more than 30 seconds and it stops the pop up box tells me to reduce the buffer size, it records for a little while longer if I increase the buffer size, however the latency is to severe.
I was advised to download my free upgrade to pt10. Pt10 will run better with 64-bit windows 7. However, I registered with avid weeks ago and haven't received that email to confirm my registration.

Help, anyone, please help?
Antonio

[albee1952]

Help us Help You - READ THIS Before Posting!
Posting a Sandra report is step #1 for solving problems. A few things to note are: Pro Tools doesn't like integrated graphics(usually), wifi/Bluetooth/networking should all be disabled when running Pro Tools, Anti-virus software should be turned off. You should be recording to a separate 7200 rpm hard drive(not the C: drive or a partition of the main system drive). With a PC and Windows 7, you would want a second internal drive(which can be done with some laptops), an eSATA drive or a USB2 drive. You should install, and run, using the Run As Admin feature(once PT is installed, right-click on the icon and find the tab with checkboxes for Always Run as Admin, and Disable Desktop Composition, and check both boxes).

[antonio iannella]

Cheers bud, I haven't bought a harddrive yet but tried disabling everything you suggested and hey presto it worked. I've been recording for 2hrs without a single stop or any distortion.
For 2 months I've been dealing with this error, its done my head in.
I don't know who you are but you're my favourite person on the planet right now!

Peace.

[albee1952]

Glad to help(sometimes we win and sometimes we don't). You still want to get yourself a proper recording drive as soon as you can. While things may work okay right now, they may not for long. As your system drive gets filled with hundreds of audio files and things get fragmented all over the drive, performance is going to suffer. Also, backup is your #1 priority(unless you enjoy losing all your work or spending full days re-installing all your software. Acronis True Image is worth its weight in gold(records). And every session should be copied to at least 2 hard drives, and preferably also burned to DVD-R. Remember, if the data doesn't exist in at least 3 places, its NOT backed up(Craig Anderton's advice).