woes continue....
well, things are not any better after about 12 hrs or so of 'troubleshooting' lol...after believing I had the power issue sorted out, a much worse software catastrophe occured! , then more original troubles.....Here's the details , if yer interested
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so after seeing the mpd-16 light up on the old pc, I decided to pull out all non-essential pci cards AND reinstall windows on my main recording pc...after that, .....success! The lights lit up when I pushed buttons, I'm thinking sweet, now just a matter of installing the mdp-16 software AND the USB drivers...well, the small utility software that allows you set the pad sensitiviyt,etc installed just fine, and the little windows balloon popped up, stating that it was recognizing the Akai unit, and I proceeded to install the USB drivers....almost all they way thru the progress bar of files being copied.....BAM!...windows spontaneously reboots!....No idea at first what caused this, then upon rebooting , I discover my 2 audio cards - Audigy 2 and Echo Layla 3G , AND my cd/dvd drive are all missing!...Drive is completely gone from 'my computer'....audio tab is greyed out in control panel....At first I wasn't aware that this was a result of trying to install the USB driver for the MPD-16, so I reinstalled windows yet again, did the same thing all over again and exact same results at the exact same point...cd/dvd and audio cards all gone from windows during the MPD-16 driver install...This time, I used system restore to get me back to the pre-mess with the drivers and called Akai tech support again...he tells me to use the drivers off the akai webpage (which I had done)...so then he thinks it may be an IRQ conflict, which sounded reasonable to me...and he said that was about as far as he could 'troubleshoot' the problem, and also suggested trying a 2 or 4 port PCI USB card and disabling the on-board USB ports.....Not knowing how to manually rearrange IRQ's (and not really wanting to tinker in the BIOS) , I bought the PCI to USB card today, that he suggested....got that installed, and wouldn't you know it, back to the original problem, the MPD-16 doesn't light up now when pushing buttons!...furthermore, windows regonized it this time as an 'unkown device' and said there is a problem with it, and trying to manually install the drivers didn't work either, I dont' REALLY think the problem is the unit, because I also managed to power it externally with a 9volt power adaptor and using only the midi cable with no USB driver installed...this works in SONAR, ...BUT, I can't seem to be able to set the pad sensitivity without being able to use the utility applet, which doesn't recognize the device without having the USB driver installed! DOH!....Next move is take this pci to USB card back, and possibly get a beefier power supply (mine is 350 watt)...