Dell Studio 15/17/XPS & Other DPC spike issues - Workaround

Ok, where to start...
I bought the highest spec Studio 17 on offer back in December, had been saving for a while purely to have a perfect system for Traktor Scratch and Ableton Live, basically a music laptop and use it for nothing else.
Spent months of pain, questioning and doubting vista. Then I stumbled across this thread, thanks a million quartz you've helped me out a lot on this one.
Ok so I ended up installing XP on a new partition and now have that running fine with most of the drivers. Have been able to suspend the acpi.sys thread successfully. DPC now shows an average of 190micro seconds latency, compared to about 1000micro seconds in Vista. Not to mention the spikes of course.

Now here's my problem. Everytime I suspend acpi.sys Traktor just freezes. It still plays the songs and if I scratch a record it still picks this up, just the GUI completely freezes. But once I resume the thread Traktor is accessible again.
Now this is the last piece of the puzzle because Ableton now works like a dream so I just want the same for Traktor. I have wasted so much of my time with this whole problem I just want to go back to mixing.
Any suggestions would be really appreciated.

 

What latency are you running Traktor at?

 

DJRob05 or DJQuartz - have you been able to find the driver for the firewire port?

Plus, I seem to remember somewhere that the built-in audio performance over the internal speakers can be improved greatly by uninstalling the IDT audio drivers. Do you know anything about this?

 

Hi Guys have not read the complete Thread , but has anyone tried Windows 7 RC? i have read in ableton forums that 7 has an outstanding Audio Performance and works with lowest latency´s

 

I haven't, but the thought of trying a third OS is exhausting to me.

 

@ bharris22

I always had the firewire drivers installed, are you having problems finding them?

 

I didn't see them on the Wickman Studios website, and just assumed they weren't there when I did the clean install of XP.
---
I finally have everything working smoothly thanks to all of the help of everyone on this forum (especially DJ Quartz!), except for one small thing. When I shut down my XP the system hangs until I pull my NI Rig Kontrol (external soundcard, essentially) from the USB port - then it shuts down. Any idea why this would happen? No biggie, I guess, but it would be nice if it just shut down.

 

Dell released new frimware for Samsung HDD for Studio laptops. I dont know if it will help, but someone could try.

 

Actually, I am experiencing general system hangs when I try to shut down, and pulling the external sound card from the USB port sometimes does not help - I end up having to remove the AC plug and pull the battery in order to get it to shut down. Does anyone have any ideas why this would happen? I have resumed acpi.sys before shutting down. Thanks!

 

I have the 32bit, and 64bit on my desktop, which I've been testing over the past few months, and I'm really happy with win7. (what vista should have been)

I bit the bullet, and I just put win7 rc on my laptop, and I must say, I'm one happy man
Win7 had all the drivers, except for the acpi (read, shortcut buttons on the laptop). I did not bother installing them, as I will NEVER use those buttons, and I didn't want to introduce possible issues.
The only driver I did go an get, was the ati driver for the graphics card, and ati/amd have a win7 driver, so this is just great.

My latency is almost half of what it was under XP, which surprised the **** out of me. DPC is happy, and so am I.

It's 4:15am so I can't give it a bash properly, but will be doing so tomorrow.

Guys, just make sure you make an image using ghost or whatever you use, and image you current setup, so if you take the win7 path and arn't happy you can splat your old image on.
I took the dual boot option, but I don't see myself booting back into XP any time soon.

 

@ bharris22

When you disable the acpi.sys thread your laptop won't shutdown automatically.

It will appear to hang but it's not locked up, the power management is disable so it doesn't send the soft command to shut down your laptop.

So you have two options...

1) Resume the acpi.sys thread before shutting your laptop down.

2) Press and hold your power button to shut down your laptop manuallly once there is no more hardrive activity has stopped during the shutdown process.

I prefer #1 because then it ensures a proper shutdown.

 

@ KEK

I might have to get Win7 once it releases. It sounds promising, I just stayed away from the Vista mess because I have everything working correctly on XP.

 

@ bharris,
As quartz said, no problems with firewire drivers. Mind you I don't have any firewire equipment to test it.
I think I got this link off this thread before but this is where I got all my drivers in one handy .rar:
http://www.samsware.com/pageLib/index/index.php

@quartz,
I've been using various latencies, it appears to be completely independent of any settings with Traktor Scratch...
It's definately nothing to do with Audio 8 as I use that with Ableton right down to the lowest latencies with no problems.

It's as if Traktor Scratch has crashed but as soon as I resume the thread it returns to normal, every time.
It's like my laptop just doesn't want me to mix!

 

Windows 7 didn't fix anything

I'm sorry to report that Windows 7 didn't fix anything regarding DPC CPU spikes stemming from using NI external sound card (in my case Kontrol 1 with an HP DV7 1275dx 64bit). I was hoping to try to see about XP emulation, but there are some hardware requirements to make it work (and I didn't meet them).

I'm looking at two options:
1. Install XP and turn off acpi.
2. Get a Macbook (I haven't seen anyone post w/ a Mac having this problem, though I did see where a defective video card was causing a similar problem).

After all the hours and hours I've worked with MS software to get things to work over the years, I'm finally thinking it's time to make the change (now that I'm trying to DJ digitally), pay a bit of a premium for the Mac and reap the rewards of a system that "just works" (if someone knows of Macs and Kontrol 1 having this issue, let me know). Sure, I think Macs are going to have issues, but I've never heard from anyone, ever, that they didn't love their Mac (especially those DJing) and wished they would have done it sooner. Yes, Win 7 is a noticeable improvement and I HIGHLY RECOMMEND you consider making it your main production software (was easy to get, easy to install, and so far works pretty good [though I cannot attest to lower latency]), but Win 7 is still Vista-based, thus same underpinnings (and same DPC spikes).

Now, I could pursue XP dual boot again (which did take a lot of time the 1st go to figure out b/c of the sata driver issue, traking it down, using nlite, on and on) and get it right this time by d/ling all the XP drivers beforehand, but I think I still have the underlying issue that there will be more problems w/ new equipment, setup, maintanence, whatever with MS. MS OSs were never built with streaming audio in-mind, though Mac (media access control) speaks for itself. I'm leaning toward sucking it up, throwing down money (that I really don't want to spend), and believing all the great stories I've heard/read about ppl moving to Mac and never looking back.

 

DJ Quartz - I believe my shutdown problems from earlier today related to not disabling the wireless card before suspending acpi.sys (I still needed to register some software over the internet and didn't want to shut off wireless just yet). The shutdown was hanging even though I did resume acpi.sys before trying to shut down. Since I disabled all networking cards I haven't had the shutdown hang, but I'm going to need to see some smooth sailing over the next few days to be convinced the problem is not there. Thanks again!

 

Here's a dumb question.

Why do you have to install the acpi drivers?

They are for the buttons on the laptop 99% of the time. How many of you ever touch those buttons?

I know thats the remaning driver to be installed on my asus, but why install it, if I will NEVER use those buttons. All the wifi switch does is disable wifi radio, not actually disable the card, which is what we all do anyways.

I see no point in installing those drivers which are causing you all headaches to begin with?

I didn't have any on my inspirion 1525, but had the spikes which is why I took it back.

The asus under xp ran nice, but DPC was showing higher readings than I would like, which is why I tried win7, an have gotten the exact result I've wanted. DPC hovering around 100-300, with an occasional max of 500ish, but under xp it was around 500 the whole way, and would spike to 1200 every so often.

 

KEK:
acpi is installed automatically when the OS detects the system to be acpi capable.
acpi is not the driver for the "special" buttons on your laptop.

 

For acpi Win7 is like Vista : spikes in DPC checker and no way to suspend acpi.sys

XP is better I think ...

 

Ok I solved my problem of traktor crashing when the acpi.sys thread is suspended. After fishing through this thread I found that I had to disable those 2 power drivers in device management to get it working as well.
Spent a whole day mixing yesterday without a single glitch. Never thought the day would come! Thanks quartz and everyone else that gave their help on here.

 

So far XP is working well again for me - with acpi.sys suspended, no spikes, much lower latency than before, and smooth sound. It was a lot of effort to switch everything back, but well worth it. Thank you everyone here for your help!