Which Laptop Specs?

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lennymac

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Beginers Recording on laptop

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Hi folks, this is my first post and I'm not really sure what I'm talking about... so please bear with me!!

I have been recording on my lap top for just over a year now - originally using an Alesis I/O 2 which has just stopped working and has now been replaced with an Mbox 2. I am using a Dell Vostro 1310 with 4 Gig RAM and Vista 32 Bit operating system. The processor is an Intel Celeron.

When I have several audio tracks/midi tracks/multiple pluguns playing the system runs slow and audio crackles etc - is this to to with the processing power of my laptop - i'm pretty sure I have enough RAM but is the intel celeron incapable of handling this much traffic - and if this is the case what sort of laptop should I be looking at - I wouldn't anticipate that I would ever have more than 4/5 midi tracks and 6/7 audio tracks running at any one time, albeit with some plugins (reverb etc) on some of the tracks.

One last thing - what is the buffer size and how does this affect latency??

Any advise/workarounds\comments would be more than welcome!!!!

thanks in advance!!
 
CPU is most likely not the problem unless you are going crazy with really heavy CPU intense processors on every track

generallly speaking (with the exception of Mac Books) Laptops are horribly executed for anything other than websurfing, checking email, facebooking and sending pictures to Grandma.
The BIOS is horribly coded and a lot of key things for audio often end up sharing IRQs with stuff like graphics cards etc causing all sorts of problems
(Before I get flamed yes some people get lucky and by chance or good research get one that does work nicely)

I'd start out here http://www.blackviper.com/
This gives a pretty good detail of what process you can turn off to maybe trim down the calls on the system by the OS and other background operations

after that go here http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml and download the DPC LAtency checker. This mat help you track down what is causing pops and clicks

you can also up the latency settings to more samples in your DAW software to see if that helps
 
thanks very much - the DPC latency checker showed me that my wireless card and internal sound card were causing problems as predicted and disabling them has made a bit of a difference - although with 1 audio track and 4 midi vst tracks running the system still doesn't seem to be able to cope, i've switched off all programs i can but it stil seems to be stalling and crackling at points. Where in the black viper paage will i find the relevant section on processes to shut down - I've had a look and am totally lost to be honest.

Thanks for your help so far!!

Ross
 
I've had perfectly stable recording rigs go to complete shit when I switched OS to Vista.:mad::mad: If you have the ability to go back to XP, then think about that.

The laptop conundrum is a tricky one. I'm one of the lucky lappy users that has had considerable success with one (until I went Vista). Bristol has the right suggestion....optimize your OS. Stock, the lappy was using almost 1 gb of memory @ rest. After optimization, It's only using 600mb. Pretty good increase.
Make sure you have the latest drivers for the Mbox. I finally had to use the generic ASIO4ALL drivers to get my interface running smoothly.
 
Guys, thanks a lot for your help - this seems to have definately freed up some processing space!!! appreciated!
 
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