[sane54]

spud wrote:
Hello, I'm in my fifth month of trying to get my Saffire LE firewire
audio device to work dependably with my Wintel laptop so I'd
appreciate any advice within the scope of your vast experience here.
No help from Focusrite or the dealer I bought it from, hence I'm
relying on you, the iron men of RAP once again.
I basically need to know how firewire is implemented on a PC under
winXP and if it can be tweaked. What is a MAC address? Is this
relevant? What is a Network Bridge? Is this relevant? As a test I
bought a TI based 1394 PCI card and installed it in a different system
and the Saffire LE worked fine so I guess the device is fine and it's
a compatibility problem.
It also worked fine for 3 months on the laptop and then one day it
just started popping. It initially took weeks of installing fresh
copies of winXP to get it going without dropouts when I first got the
product but it finally took. I don't know what I did to mess it up. I
don't think it's the ASIO buffers or anything to do with the drivers,
video settings, memory etc. I've had lot's of pc's and many windows
configurations, usually based on the RME or Tascam website tweaks.
I've tried hundreds of different settings with this Saffire thing and
my conclusion is I think XP treats FW peripherals as if they were part
of a network and this is wherein the rub lays. Is there a basic
utility to check 1394 throughput? If I could get some advice around
this I would appreciate it.
Some details:
Desknote I-Buddy A928 pseudo-laptop pc with WinXp. I've tried SP1 and
Sp2 both at various times, including the KB885222 patch.
Sis650 mb, 512MB mem, 1.7G P4, shared video, bios is current.
This machine has 6 pin FW, USB2. No PCMIA.
FireWire/1394 Controller/Hub:
VIA OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394 Host Controller
VIA Technologies Inc VT6306 VIA Fire II IEEE-
1394 OHCI Link Layer Controller
Interface: OHCI Speed: 400MHz
Also: As a threshold maneuver I have been doing flat installs of XP
and then the Saffire driver and testing it with the Windows media
player. No software or anything (although I have tried software and
ASIO settings too) so it's not like I'm trying this on a corrupt
system.
The Saffire driver routine also installs about 10 other things:
Microsoft streaming kernel something, channel forking widget, Audio
superfelator exemplification module etc and seems to modify some MS
files in the process so I wonder if XP is deleting the modified files
and replacing them with the originals. It all shows up in Control
Panel/Sounds and Audio Devices correctly and you can select the device
in software, adjust the ASIO or WDM settings etc, it just drops out
every 2 seconds or so regardless. The closest I came to success was
during one flat install I could play an mp3 in the media player fine
but when I rebooted it was screwed again. Please send help.
Thanks as alway, s.

It worked fine for 3 months and then the drop-outs started? Also you
take the unit to another box and it works fine? That strongly indicates
a hardware problem unless you 1. Remember doing something to the box
just beforehand 2. Use this box on the internet 3. Think some rogue
piece of software corrupted your driver. However, hardware related to
the Firewire port is much much much more likely. If you can't get a
PCMCIA adapter, maybe something like a USB/Firewire converter exists?
But more likely, its time for a new laptop.