Just checked CPU speed. Is definitely running at or very close to 650Mhz. Just slipped the MDK 9.2 HD into my other identical machine but with 256 megs of RAM. It's cookin'!!! Call me stoopid expecting miracles out of 128megs?? :/ Anyway, this is what I was looking for!! Ardour mixer, Freeverb, 3 band Parametric in post fade...single send from my mixer, panable stereo outs back to mixer! I'll leave it running for awhile but so far no xruns, good latency and sounds better than the Alesis units with a lot more flexibilty. I'll try adding some other plugins later to see where it starts to stall out on performance...but just this as is makes me happy. I already had the laptop...if this stays up reliably thru a gig, I just saved a couple o' hundred bux on yet another piece of gear! thanks Russell On Mon, 2004-02-09 at 11:20, Russell Hanaghan wrote: > On Mon, 2004-02-09 at 11:06, Chris Pickett wrote: > > > I am still unable to run Jack at anything less than 1024 without having > > > Xrun hell. I set the HD to DMA "on" I had apm as opposed to acpi > > > running...turned it off and found no difference. > > > > Check that your CPU speed is not getting screwed up by the power > > management (i.e. you have the full 650 MHz). I don't know if it's even > > a problem for Dell laptops, but it was/is for certain Thinkpads. > > I've had this problem in Winblowz before and also a BIOS upgrade that > Dell had about 2 revisions ago. I think it is running full stem but I'll > check. > > I also tried this on another identical laptop that has 256 megs...with > negligble difference although, come to think of it, I only tried with > Ecamegapedal and not Ardour. I'll try that a bit later today. > > Thanks > > > > > > I notice that running Ardour (Beta .9beta 9 RPM from Thacs RPMs), after > > > I have fired up Jackstart or Jackd-realtime from Qjackctl with -d alsa > > > hw:0 1024 2 as root and then fire up Ardour and add a track, the pcm > > > chain is connected (also visible in Qjackctl "Connect")and I have sound > > > but the pc starts running slow and the Hard drive light is constantly > > > on. I'm not recording anything...is this Jack writing to disc? I only > > > have 128 megs in this machine... > > > > It's worth maxing out the RAM in your laptop. I have a Thinkpad with > > similar specs, and I found upgrading from 128 to 384 Mb RAM made a huge > > difference in performance. Make sure you get the right kind, or at > > least a compatible kind. It seems likely that this is the problem; even > > if it isn't, it's still a very worthwhile (and cheap) upgrade. > > > > Cheers, > > Chris >