Laptop configurations

[soulwire]

I am a softsynth hound, I love softsynths (especially Colossus -- 32 GB Synth). Anyways, I finally decided to take the plunge and gig live (I'm a studio musician so that means buying some gear!). I have a nice desktop computer but wanted a laptop for live. I purchased a Toshiba Satellite Intel Core 2 Duo T5200 with 2 gigs of Ram and dual hard drives. It came with Windows Vista.I loaded my programs on there (Sonar, FL Studio, Reason) and lo and behold, Sonar couldn't find my audio card. No problem, I had a Korg Kontrol 1 coming (I knew the laptops sound card latency would be an issue since it's not ASIO. Korg Kontrol looked nice, USB ASIO with 2 ins and 2 outs so you could have a click track on one out, with the music on the other). I got the Kontrol 1 and plugged it in. Ahh, got a decent 15 msec latency, not bad not bad. I do computer tech support at my work, so I'm lucky to know how to tweak away but I never messed much with laptops (strange but true!). Here was my problem... The first is that there are some programs that I use that are written in XP that don't work in Vista (Boo!). If you ever heard of a yamaha EZ-AG, you can basically have a MIDI guitar for about $150 (works great too, I've been using it for a couple years!) but the interface only works in XP. So then I downgraded to XP, after much boohooing (Vista looked perty). Another thing I noticed is even with the modified soundcard, about every 45 seconds my sound would lag for about 1 second! I'd be playing a song and everything would just completely seize up for a moment. It was driving me nuts. I adjusted the latency and was able to finally get it to stop lagging if I used a 40 msec delay (40 msec ahhh!) so I was bummed and determined to figure out what the heck it was. Maybe the laptop wasn't fast enough to handle live audio. Well, I won't bore you with all the details, but the end, I learned the two most important things 1) Many laptops use integrated memory for graphics acceleration. 2) WirelessDisabling both of those (while composing) fixed the latency problems. It's easy to re-enable as well (just go to system properties and right click to disable/enable) So that might be some food for thought if your laptop is giving you problems as well (or if you're thinking about purchasing). It worked for me at least! Now this baby is sizzlin! WOoohooo!

[mazz]

Hi,Are you using the second drive for your samples (Colossus does use streaming, right?) You may already know that it's best to have a drive dedicated to your samples/audio tracks. Hopefully that drive is 7200RPM or faster.It's a drag that some of your gear was not Vista compatible. Not being that familiar with Windows myself, would you put Vista back on if all of your gear became Vista-ized?I have a couple of Windows machines I use just as sample players and was wondering if it would be worth taking the plunge to Vista. Would I be gaining any performance or would I just end up cursing Bill Gates more than I already do? Ciao,John Mazzei

[soulwire]

Yeah, Colossus streams direct from disk. Errmmm, unfortunately I do believe it's 5400 (you know how laptops can be) but the plan is to render most of the tracks that I won't be playing live, so it won't be crunching the drive so hard. I have a pretty good desktop PC to handle the core of home studio composing. Yep, I am using my softsynths on the separate drive to keep it easy on old Lappy. It was a drag that the program wasn't Vista compatible. Unfortunately, the XP program was done by an inspired programmer that wanted to turn an electronic guitar learning system into a MIDI guitar so there are no updates (don't know where he disappeared to!) and it's likely there will never be a Vista release for it.The plunge to Vista. I have read up on articles and they have said that it handles audio in a different way, and it handles ASIO with less CPU usage. It didn't say how much less, but that's just what I read when I was researching it on Google. I figure I'll keep with XP unless the demand becomes so great that I need to upgrade...As for cursing Bill Gates, hahaa, as much fun as it is to do, I am so glad that we don't have 5-10 operating systems with hardware developers writing for each one. But its still fun to poke at Bill, I can't deny that! haha.. Take it easy bro.