Hi,

I have a laptop, core i5 2nd generation, 4GB RAM and NI Guitar Rig Session USB audio interface. While running reaper, there i a freeze/dropped audio for 2 secs every once in a while. But it does not happen on all days. I am thinking another 4GB Ram. What say? I have 2GB hard-disk space empty, can that be the problem?

Now can anybody suggest the best software for tweaking or gaining more control of the PC, that actually works?
What I do now is every time i reboot, i go to the task manager and 'End Process Tree' on all those processes which are redundant (Helpers, Update installers, bluetooth etc). After that I go to services and Stop some of the redundant ones.
Can you suggest a program or method that automates it and lets me see deeper?
I have one called Game Booster that shuts down all non-essentials, but the gain is only slight, if at all.

Thanks a lot
Peace

 

I know its properly not what you want to hear, but you really should consider buying a PC. You can build a good one for about 500€. I guess you could buy a comparible PC for 600-700€, just look its not from a company that preinstalls a lot of useless crap, or consider reinstalling windows before using.

There are so many pros for using a PC.
You are forced to produce on one spot the whole time, so you setup everything for that exact spot (for example speakers).
You can update the hardware, you properly dont even have to setup new windows (I didnt had to do it, and a practicly changed everything except the hard drive and my graphic card... well, and my pc case). You can also buy a new monitor everytime. Your notebook will always have the same screen...
You'll properly have way more connections for stuff like USB or whatever. My notebook only have two USB connections, that pretty much sucks... Also because of my PCi card I have better audio connections.
Since you have a notebook, you dont have any need for internet access. Thats a huge advantage, because you dont have to run protection like firewalls or virus scanners. Also you keep your computer very clean, no huge temporarily files because of streaming or something, no big risk of viruses, worms, etc, no distrection while you're producing. For me its a blessing that I dont have internet access on my audio PC.

With a good PC you wont have to think about those things. Boosting or tweaking isnt a good solution.

If you dont have the money, now you have something to save your money for

 

Unistall game booster and all the programs you dont use.Free some space from your hard drive 2 gigs left only from your hard drive is why your pc freezes.A good program to use for pc maintanance is glary utilities.Stop all windows services that is not nedded see here My link

 

I don't think the extra ram will help with the drop out, sounds like a process hogging the cpu, have you tried tweaking with "God Mode" ?

 

Disable unnecessary services, start-up entries or follow a guide to tweak PC for audio.
Alternatively, TuneUP utilities 2010 and older might help with tuning.

PS: Buying new monster CPU computer does not always help. It'll increase the CPU headroom but does not solve the problem.

 

Agree with Andrew, Black Viper is the first place to head.

2gig free on your hdd also aint gonna help. Your files are intertwined amongst all that bloat and finding what samples, etc are needed would be kinda like wading through treacle. You are NEVER really meant to fill your system drive past 80% full don`t cha know?

Best thing you can do though is follow Someone`s advice and start saving for a PC. You will save yourself untold heartache and hair pulling by starting with a PROPER machine. It`s like this, if you gonna SERIOUSLY play with audio, you need a serious audio machine.... SIMPLES! *yes*

Best of luck with it. I`d defo clean the bloat off that hdd, visit Black Viper and kill as many services as you can. Consider your Lappie your "intro" machine and save for that "pro" machine.

 

In my opinion a core i5 2nd generation, 4GB RAM is more than sufficient for running guitar rig with a decent latency time so follow the above advice and try DPC latency to find issues. I run guitar rig at 256 with a prehistoric asus amd3000 laptop, an emu 1616m, xp, 2gb ram without any click, only the fan noise

 

If your hard drive space is less than 10% then its a good chance that's the problem

@ Angie I have (and use) an old Dell D610 2Gb ram works well apart from a few of the newer more complex patches

 

For heaven's sake, can people please stop recommending to disable loads of services? This is ancient advice and is mainly for older single core CPU's. The guy has an i5, a few background processes aren't going to make any difference, maybe 1% if you're lucky. Sure some background processes can slow things down, such as anti virus software, but most Windows services don't take up much CPU.

If you're getting audio dropouts it could be due to your CPU clocking down under low load. They do this by design, when the CPU usage is low they dynamically slow down. The problem is that this can cause higher audio latencies. The solution I found was to use a program called ThrottleStop, it's free and can be found using Google. Just set your CPU to run at high speed during music production, then you can put it back to normal afterwards.

The other problem could be due to high DPC latency, usually caused by drivers. Try disabling hardware that you're not using, such as webcams, network cards etc. You can do this in the BIOS or in Device Manager.

You didn't tell us, what version of Windows are you using? If it's 7, there's a free tool called DPC latency checker that will show if you have any problems.

 

and what are the symptoms of a pc/laptop running software with a full or very nearly full Hard drive?

 

A nearly full HDD can slow a computer down if it's running low on RAM and using a lot of virtual memory(paging to the HDD).

It shouldn't affect audio tasks too much tbh, unless memory is that low. Still, it's a good idea to leave a decent amount of space on your HDD.

 

I think oska hasn't got enough room on his HD and read/write cache is causing his system to pause whilst updating

 

You should definitely free up space on your HDD but the drop outs have to be CPU based. Are you following this simple rule with the buffer size in the audio interface: when recording set low - when mixing set high?? If you are getting dropouts then either lower or raise accordingly.

 

Sorry to the OP for going OT for a second, but........

Fuck me, aint this community quite simply, far and away the BEST, with some seriously decent human beings for members?

Thanks for listening!

 

(VirtualMark) "A nearly full HDD can slow a computer down if it's running low on RAM and using a lot of virtual memory(paging to the HDD). "...
- This is only half true.

Yes low RAM can cause a lot of paging 'page faults' / swapping to the HD, but there is already a zone of preset size reserved on the HD to accommodate this; Pagefile.sys
The pagefile size should usually be set to 1.5 * times the RAM size.

 

How is it half true? The 1.5 times the RAM size is ancient advice, literally from the 90s. Some people have 32Gb of RAM, are you suggesting they have a 48Gb page file?

The best thing to do is to let Windows manage the size, it's improved a lot over the years. I have an SSD and HDD in my laptop, and have set the page file to Windows managed on the SSD and disabled it on the HDD.

 

God. Sorry, no time to post BOOKS and knowledge about Winblows OS that takes years to acquire. People all want everything instantly these days. Everything you do if you want to learn something requires: making mistakes, learning from them, applying the new knowledge. There are NO shortcuts.

or install "PC adviser" or some other no worth crap malware that does to your computer who-knows-what. The web is full of malware that only fucks up your computer. You've probably installed one of these. I can tell. That's probably one of the problems you have. It's better to use a clean OS instead. You've just installed too much rubbish on it. I see this happening DAILY. People thinking "I'm so smart, I'm using a computer, I will install this and it will make me even smarter and my computer be the fastest in the neighbourhood!" LOL No it won't. It'll hose you computer and make you learn not to install this crap at any time any more.

I know people and how they deal with their computers. Most of them think that god gave them brains, golden brains, and they know it all without even having to learn anything. To those I say...

Good luck with your egotrip!

... and eventually they all call me to remedy the crap they've done.

Time, patience, learn. My only advice. No additional "optimising" software is needed AT ALL. I know of only one software that is really useful and practical and that's "crap cleaner", or CCleaner. Everything else is BS. All you need on your computer is CCleaner regarding "optimising performance", really. No software can do anything for Windows to perform better. It's a crap OS to tell the truth. But if you run CCleaner once in a while you can at least keep it running for years and years without becoming over-clogged with garbage.

Cheers!

 

A: Why uninstall game booster? Because it says game in the name of it?... I won't go off on this, but don't tell people to do things if you don't know what they do.
B: If you are going to make such statements back them up, or admit to not knowing.

Gamebooster works fine, it works differently on different spec'd systems so while on some it seems to help a lot other it seems minimal but still does more than you think.



As for your issues, you have a laptop which has several things that are not "ideal" for audio production.

1. 4 gigs of memory isn't very ideal for music production. But unless you use multiple plug-ins/libraries that use large files it's not a huge issue.
2. Your problem with freezing isn't due to resources, or at least on a clean system. It's more likely a driver/hardware issue.
3. Optimizing your system is easy but takes some knowledge. I'd start with going to your install/uninstall programs, going into the window component menu and disabling everything you don't use like xps viewer, print/fax, touch enable, etc. Everything you do use runs in the background
4. How did you get this laptop? With pre-installed OS and bloatware. Registry keys from programs that no longer function or have been deleted also can do a number as they run all the time.
5. Run msconfig [or task manager in win8] and disable everything in the start menu you dont absolutely need running everytime you start up.
6. Clear your desktop and put the contents in a desktop folder. The more things on your desktop the more active memory it needs to remember it all. Seems stupid but it has an effect.
7. Wifi uses TONS of resources. If you turn your wifi off, you'll see performance improvements.
8. Clean OS. Nothing beats a clean OS with no bloatware or extra crap that will stunt your PC for the rest of it's life on an old OS.

As said it's not that your comp isn't good enough for guitar rig [while it's a cpu hog even a crap laptop can run it without issues]. I use it for band practice when I don't want to take my amp, I just line to my laptop and then into the PA system. So one way or another there are things you can do but it sounds like a driver issue or programs that are interfering with it.

 

Last year I switched back to Windows for my mobile laptop rig and been pretty happy with the speed improvements I implemented. First and foremost check out what the other dudes have been posting as well as search for this topic on youtube if you haven't done so already. Presonus has some good tips and guides in their Studio One pages, which are helpful even if you do not have studio one.

I would say that the two biggest improvements I made were to install a Solid State Hard drive to run my system and apps off of while using my original HDD in a tray that replaced my cd-rom to host projects, samples, and any junk I didn't want mucking up my SDD. The second big improvement was to use Process Lasso (h**p://bitsum.com/processlasso/) which helps manage processes' priorities, what resources they use, and also makes sure your computer is using all its CPU's efficiently.