djDecks Forum

Hi everyone,

With my purchase of a new laptop, Dell XPS M1530 and Focusrite Saffire LE sound interface, I had a bit of an ordeal getting the interface to function properly on it. The OS is windows XP SP2, which was a fresh load and only had the necessary drivers installed on it. All the latest windows updates were installed and installed the latest nvidia video drivers. Specifically, I was getting audio drop outs, pitch synch issues (wandering for a second or two.) So I thought I'd share some of my tools that I've found on the net to help anyone else out..

*** CAUTION: If you mess-up your computer using one of these tools, I take no responsibility!! ***

1. http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml Latency Checker. This one is handy even for those of you that are using USB interfaces
2. http://www.diefer.de/speedswitchxp/ Speedswitch will make sure that speedstep technology is set to maximum performance for your laptop
3. http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=951 PCI Latency tool. Good for changing latency on problematic devices
4. http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=983781 Multi-core patches for windows XP
5. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/885222 Microsoft Windows firewire update

Ok, so here is how i did it.

I used the DPC Latency checker for peaks of misbehaving kernel mode drivers. This will show devices on your system that can be causing spikes of load to the kernel that will cause audio streams to drop out. The link above (1) shows proper utilization of the tool.

Since I also wanted to use my laptop for other purposes, I created another hardware profile by copying the existing profile to a new one, and modifying it. Goto System properties, hardware profiles, and copy the default profile to a new one. You can then modify either the current or copied profile. If you would like to modify the copied, then you'll need to restart your machine and apply that profile on boot. I named them "dj decks" and "regular" so that I know at a peek which one is being used.

I installed the Speedswitch utility, Multi-core patches, and firewire updates.

I then started disabling devices in windows device manager, until the DPC tool was reporting that the system was capable of handling the audio streams without dropouts. In my case, a misbehaving WiFi and Wired network adapters, integrated sound, integrated ricoh card reader were causing issues.

Also tweaking the nvidia drivers for maximum performance, improved the DPC latency. Odd thing is, I have a 5 year old p4 2.2ghz system that has way more devices on it, and it runs the DPC tool flawlessly (and even after all the tweaks, better than my new laptop)

I believe I'm going to install another copy of XP on this machine and setup a dual boot that will be stripped completely of un-necessary drivers and only for DJ decks.

hope this helps some people out!

Thanks for your work. Some pretty usefull tools there....gotta try em out tomorrow

updated !