Any hope for PTLE on my Acer Aspire 2001?

[mdfried]

I recently bought an Acer Aspire 2001, since its specs seemed to be a good match for PTLE/MBox. Apparently either there's some inherent conflict going on that no one can identify, or there's something wrong with the install, because it won't record more than one track at a time or play back any without buffer too big/too small errors. My WinXP Pro has the SP1, and I've reinstalled PTLE 6.1.1 twice using all the h/w and s/w tweaks recommended by everyone I've found. An hour on the phone with Digi's support yielded no results, and Acer's guy never even heard of ProTools. Is there any hope here, or do I need to start over on a different system (if I do, it'll be on an Athlon desktop)? I need closure here, so someone PLEASE help...

[mdfried]

bump...c'mon, anybody???

[davidbowman]

Well if for some reason (may be the chipset or motherboard) your acer is not working right the best thing you can do is get a new pc i know it sounds radical but is the safe option here

If you can afford it go for a intel motherboard / processor more costly but whit best quality and speed

[mdfried]

Well, after starting over from scratch with the factory system restore disks, then tweaking XP and reloading everything, I finally got PTLE to run. I'm able to get Davec results of 32 tracks with 5 plugins plus 4 aux ins with five plugins on each after a fresh boot. The biggest problem left that I haven't been able to fix is that I can't record on a playback engine sample buffer setting less than 1024 without getting the "interrupts held off too long" error. The system is also requiring me to save my session frequently and reboot after running other apps. Is everybody's LE system this squirrely? Any likely culprits to look for? BTW, I have 512mb RAM, but will add more if that's the problem.

[oedipus_complex]

I also have an Acer Aspire (1703SC), and can't record more than one track at a time. I believe the problem is a Sis chip integrated into the motherboard. How'd you get yours running as good as it is?

Edit: I'm also using an Mbox

[mdfried]

I've seen no reference to Sis chips in what specs I've been able to find on my machine (Aspire 2000 series), but if they're in there I guess that could be our problem. I wish I could say that my DaveC results translated to stellar tracking capability, but that's still not the case. Since PT's meter shows little strain on the system or CPU, I'm guessing that the playback engine buffer problems are related to either I/O interrupt conflicts or poor memory handling.

To answer your question, what I've done so far is reinstall WinXP, then I set up a separate PT hardware profile (start->settings->control panel->system->hardware->hardware profiles) by copying the current (default) profile, renaming the new one, then rebooting to it. From the device mamanger I then disabled (for this profile only) every device I could find that PT doesn't use such as the printer, infrared, pcmcia card, modem, and network adapters. Be sure that you're displaying hidden devices as well, as some of the network adapters won't show otherwise. I then set up a separate user account for PT (start->settings->control panel->user accounts), changed to it, and changed the XP settings as directed by the PT documentation and rebooted to the PT profile. I then installed PT and it's at least working with some babying...hope this helps.

[Aussie Scott]

Are any of your devices like USB etc sharing IRQ's - I'm trouble shooting a different laptop (Fujitsu Lifebook 6120) and am having similar problems. This error type seems to be related to IRQ sharing - which is a relatively easy fix on a desktop, but not on a laptop. The BIOS is where such things can be altered - however the laptop BIOS is pretty light on for options. I'll let you know if Fujitsu come up with anything.

[mdfried]

Yes, there is a lot of IRQ sharing going on, especially with USB, video, and FireWire (great, the three things being used the most...). For the heck of it I'm going to try changing USB ports for the Mbox (hadn't thought of trying that before). My BIOS setup doesn't have the facility to change IRQs either - I've been wondering if there may be another way to force devices to a different one?