PT Free R2 works (finally) on my HP Pavilion

[normg]

I have been trying to get PT Free to work for a month or so on an HP Pavillion 8550C I bought last year.

In order to get it to work at all, I removed lots of programs that HP starts up in the "startup menu" as suggested on this board, but it crashed a lot - lots of reboots.

I upgraded to 256K RAM - a little improvement, but still lots of crashes. I had to run PT Free first upon booting up the system in order to get PT Free to work at all.

I tried PT Free R2 and it was a little better, but still crashed often and I still had to run it first after booting the computer or no-go.

I finally got it to work reliably by replacing the sound card HP supplies with the 8550C with a Soundblaster 16 PCI card. No more crashes and I'm able to reliably record, edit and save audio files.

Now, maybe I'll go ahead and buy the Digi ToolBox XP.