Strange one, I'm running Cubase SX2 on a laptop aswell, I also use
guitar rig...my laptop is an aging piece of crap (Dell Latitude, P3
1.2ghz, 256mb ram) I'm currently mixing a live gig on it which has 17
tracks, and I've got a fair few amount of inserts going on. For demoing
in the bedroom I'll be using Native Instruments Battery, 2 or 3 Guitar
rig tracks, a bass track (usually with amplitude inserted) and some
vocal tracks with some CPU hungry voxengo plugs going on. I've seen the
sort of problems you are describing occur on my older PC, it was a
Duron 1ghz, (duron is to athlon what celeron is to pentium I think...)

I'm using M-Audio transit (a USB 24/96 box) and I need to reset the
device a lot of time...have you tried better audio hardware? Even a
replacement unit? I remember trying another M-Audio USB device (one
which had an XLR socket and 6.4mm line level socket) I just couldn't
get it to work at all. Could only record and playback a really
scractchy sound.... I know people who have similar problems with other
M-Audio stuff. My problem is using USB1 devices...surely a firewire
product such as yours with your setup should work flawlessly compared
to my setup above? How clean is your OS build?

SjT wrote:
Hi, i currently have an Acer Aspire 1862WLMi laptop hooked up to an
M-Audio Firewire Solo and am getting problems with it, basically the
CPU load jumps every minute or so and puts my audio out of sync and
adds nasty spikes of noise to the mix.

I thought it was related to the speedstep technology on the centrino
chipset (It is the 1.6ghz Pentium-M chip), but after using utilities
to set my power profile to always on (Which is supposedly disabling
speedstepping i still get the same problem.

I'm now considering taking the laptop back for an Acer Aspire
3023WLMi, it has a Sempron 3000 CPU on board... My concerns here are
how hot the Semprons run, and which is the best processor for use with
Cubase and my firewire solo device.. I only use about 3 audio tracks
(2 using guitar rig plugin), a drum track (groove agent or similar)
and one or two soft synths if required.

I'm guessing the Centrino 1.6ghz and Sempron 3000 would be similar in
terms of performance? But obviously a concern is for how long these
can run (i.e. heat being an issue). I usually sit down and record for
2-3 hours at a time.

Thanks for any help/advice anyone can give me.

--
I'm the only gay in this groupage