[j59621]

For all who are running vista on a new notebook and have all but given up on Pro Tools do not give up yet!

I recently purchased an Mbox 2 for use with my new dell inspiron 1420 and after 6 days of trying to record on Pro Tools LE 7.4 cs2 without a buffer error 9092 or similar errors I was about to give up. My system contains the following specs:

Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.0 Ghz
2 Gigs of DDR2 Ram
160 Gb internal SATA hard drive with AHCI @ 5400rpm
Windows Vista Business

I did a whole lot of research on the internet in many pro tools forums (including this one) and in order to get my system to record in Pro Tools without a buffer error, I had to make the following changes and configurations:

1. FIRST AND FOREMOST: Do not record onto the drive on which your OS and Pro Tools is installed. This is very important. Pro Tools cannot effectively record onto the same drive that windows and pro tools are running off of.
Make sure you are using a FIREWIRE drive that is at least 7200rpm and turn indexing off on that drive and enable it for quick removal in windows. A USB drive will not work at all.

2. Disable all network adapters...even your bluetooth adapter

3. Disable your screen saver and do not allow windows to turn off your display at all while pro tools is running. Furthermore, make sure you follow the pro tools windows optimization settings (you can find them in the support section of Digidesign's site)

4. Turn off all running processes that are not necessary for Pro Tools and Windows

5. Disable your ACPI Battery

6. Have nothing plugged into your computer except your Pro Tools I/O device (e.g Mbox 2) and your firewire drive

7. Set Processor Scheduling to Background Services

8. Disable any visual themes in Vista (especially Aero!)

9. Tweak the Playback engine settings in Pro Tools. This is the biggest pain and it took me the longest to figure out which combination of settings worked the best. For me it was just trial and error to get the settings to where they needed to be.


Pro Tools is such a selfish program that you need to do all of these things in order for it to work. Luckily all of these changes take little more than a couple minutes to implement (except for the purchasing of a new external drive if you do not already have one) and you can change all the settings back when you aren't using pro tools.

I hope this helps some frustrated people who don't want a very expensive paper weight.