Laptop recording problems - fixed

[UK RAF]

I have been trying to set up my Amilo Pro V7010 (P4 3.06 GHz) for use with Pro Tools LE (with Digi 002).

At first I found some pretty serious problems - such that the system had to be majorly tweaked in order for it to record more than a minute without hanging and stopping. I had used different hardware profiles (with all extraneous hardware disabled), minimal processor functions and so on.

After upgrading my HDD (from a 40 gig 4200rpm drive to an 80gig 5400rpm drive), I reinstalled the system and found that Pro Tools would record 16 simultaneous tracks without problems immediately without any hardware tweaks, and with all visual styles turned on.

Why the difference?

Well, there are two things that I did differently:

1) I had changed to a faster hard drive (although I this couldn't explain the laboured performance in the previous install.)

2) I went to the Fujitsu-Siemens and downloaded the latest specified drivers for the PCI bus and cardbus.

I believe it is this second point that has made the difference.

Even though there were no errors showing, using standard windows XP drivers for the hardware on the laptop (the PCI bus - in this instance "ATI Busmaster", and the Texas Instruments cardbus interface) must have been causing all the problems with the previous install.

So, my advice to anyone out there who is having trouble with their laptop not recording properly in Pro Tools, just see if your manufacturer has included custom drivers for your PCI and Card busses!

My laptop is currently recording 16 channels of 96kHz audio in the background whilst I am browsing the web and writing emails in outlook. It has not complained once!

Believe me - I have struggled for months with this, but am now totally happy!

I hope this helps someone else...

[The Weed]

Ahhhhh....

From the compatibility pages:

Recording to the system startup drive is not recommended or supported.

Although limited recording and playback of audio tracks may be possible using the internal drive in laptop models, a separate external dedicated audio hard drive is highly recommended for maximum performance and track count. Digidesign recommends the use of FireWire drives for use with these computers.

For best performance on laptops, it is suggested that you set your monitor to 256 colors.


And from the storage requirements page:

Hard Drive Requirements for IDE/ATA, SATA, FireWire or SCSI drives.

Minimum speed of 7200 RPM & average seek time of less than 10.0 ms.

FAT32 or NTFS file system for Windows XP.

Windows XP is unable to create a FAT32 partition on a drive that is larger than 32 GB. If your drive is larger than 32 GB, either use a partitioning application such as PartitionMagic® or use the NTFS file system.

Windows NTFS or FAT32 formatted drives supported on Mac OS X for transfer only.

Mac HFS+ supported on Windows XP for transfer only when using MacDrive 6.

Recording to boot drive not recommended or supported.

Each IDE drive must have DMA enabled in the "System" Control Panel. This can be changed in the "Settings" of each IDE drive on the "Device Manager" tab of the "System" Control Panel. For detailed instructions click here.

Pro Tools does not support RAID technology. Please do not activate this feature on any Pro Tools recording drives.

Pro Tools only supports Basic drive Types (Dynamic drive types are not supported).

Drives should be formatted with Windows XP disk administration without Dynamic Disk selected.


Reading these pages would have saved you a lot of grief.

Cheers,

[UK RAF]

Bruce, thanks for the response, but I think you missed the point.

I had tried all the hardware tricks in the book (I mean all of them!), and am well aware of all the recommendations and hardware fixes on the web and on the digidesign website.

By using a combination of almost all of these I was able to get the laptop working using the previous install. However, NONE of this was necessary this time - I just needed to have installed new drivers from stuff that was already installed by windows XP without complaints (namesly the PCI bus and Cardbus).