Won't Record!

[Benjamino]

Hi, I'm a Mac user (Digi002, Protools7 etc.) but I gave my old MBox (original) along with the Protools LE 6.9 windows installer CD-ROM to my girlfriend who has a Dell laptop (less than a year old) running WinXP.

We followed the installation procedure exactly, changed the system settings etc. recommended for use with Protools and it all installed fine, the MBox installed fine.

Once in a session, everything seems to work, she gets a signal reading in the meter, 'record enables' the track, presses the 'rec' button on the transport, but when she hits play to start recording either nothing happens and all the record enable buttons disarm, or she gets a dialogue box saying "Operating system held off interupts for too long, try increasing hardware buffer size".

She has subsequently tried it on all available buffer sizes, with the DAE buffer on levels 2, 4 and 8 but the same thing happens. It will not record any audio.

She has 512MB RAM, her CPU is an Intel Celeron 1.5GHz (easily fast enough) and the usage limit is set at the maximum of 85%.

I've known people to run 'tools on far less powerful computers than hers with no problems at all. All she's trying to do at the moment is record a single guitar track!!

I don't know a great deal about running Protools on Windows, is there something obvious that we're missing?

I did notice on the compatibility page of the Digidesign Support site that MBox does not support Intel Celeron and Pentium III processors, is this the problem? It seems the obvious answer but surely if that was the problem it wouldn't run at all, rather than working fine (even to the point of audio signal being passed through and audible) right up until she presses record?

Any advice anyone can offer would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Ben

[spkguitar]

I did notice on the compatibility page of the Digidesign Support site that MBox does not support Intel Celeron and Pentium III processors, is this the problem?

Most likely, yes.

You also didn't mention what external drive you are recording to, so I can only assume that you are not using one at all and are trying to record to the internal drive? Pro Tools requires that the session files are created and used on a separate physical disk spinning at a rotational speed of 7200rpm to function properly. Most likely the hard drive in the laptop is 5400rpm, or even worse 4200rpm, which is far too slow for Pro Tools.