Inspiron 640m and Presonus Firepod Success!

I was nervous about getting the 640m because of the horror stories I've read here in getting it to work with the Presonus Firepod. I like to do some remote recording now and then so this is important to me. I e-mailed Presonus and they said the Firepod is compatible with VIA chipsets. So I decided to give it a shot and ordered the 640m, Core 2 Duo at 2.0GHz. I figured I'd send it back if it didn't work.

Using a 4 pin to 6 pin Firewire cable I hooked up the Firepod and it was instantly recognized. The blue light turned on and I was set to go.

Next I opened Sony Vegas 7 and recorded a track. Unfortunately there were two problems:
Upon playback there would be a nonrepeatable glitch every now and then.
Upon playback there would be a repeatable glitch every now and then.

I should have stated in the beginning of the message that I uninstalled almost every bit of Dell installed software before even trying this.

So after a few hours of head scratching and experimenting I diasabled my wireless "n" network adapter and gave it a try. One minute into the recording and no glitches, two minutes, three minutes, four minutes... looks good!

Now I tried to use input monitor recording to really give it a work out. I set the Firepod control panel CPU setting to "High" and set the latency to 4ms, which I consider acceptable for overdubbing, even on bass.

Well, it worked and is still working perfectly! I'm really happy about this as you can image.

So if you're getting glitches with the Firepod try disabling your wireless network adapter while you're doing audio work.

Hopefully this will help someone.

- Mark