Studio 1537 DPC Latency Hell

Hi does anyone out there know how to drastically reduce DPC latency spikes on my Dell Studio 1537? I am trying to stream audio through the firewire but due to the rediculous high DPC spiking the audio connection errors every 4 seconds and sound keeps dropping out even with silly asio latency of 512.

Bascially the laptop in its current configuration is simply useless at streaming audio and using the dpclatency checker the spike are constantly pinging up to once 4000 every 3 or 4 seconds.

I have the following setup
Studio 1537 : Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 (2.26GHz,1066MHz,3MB)
Memory : 3072MB (1x2048 + 1X1024) 800MHz DDR2 Dual Channel
Hard Drive : 160GB Serial ATA (7200RPM)
Graphics : 256 MB ATI Mobility RADEON HD 3450
Wireless : Intel WiFi Link 5300 (802.11 a/g/n) Half Mini Card European
running on Vista X86 Ultimate with latest Bios A05 & drivers

Basically this setup should stream audio no problems if it had proper driver support? (It is not the Ricoh firewire port as disabling it does not reduce the DPC latency)

I have done all of the obvious , disabled every possible hardware in device manager all to no avail. I also reinstalled vista off DVD without installing all hardware drivers (totally clean) and ran dpclatency checker and still it spikes over 4000 every 4 seconds.

This to me therefore means either the Bios or the Chipset has a major problem that needs fixing? Oh, I have even tried taking battery out, manually setting fan speed etc all to no avail.

I am still just within my 14day period so now thinking of asking for my money back unless someone can pinpoint where the problem lies and if it can be resolved. It is ashame as the look & feel of the laptop is superb but obviously can't do what I want it to do - record music to a professional standard.

Any advice out there appreciated. Thanks

 

That's actually what I think about this issue. After proving that even normal Windows services and standard drivers cause DPC spikes, Dell admitted to me personally that the Vostro xx10 and Precision series of laptops have this issue and they told me it can't be fixed. From my research I'm sure that Inspirons are affected in the same way (identical DPC behavior). I'm not *that* sure about XPS and Studio, but their DPC behavior is bad as well.

You can

0. Use XP instead of Vista, Vista has a very negative impact on DPC latencies
1. Turn off WLAN, better deactivate the card in Device Manager
2. Remove the battery
3. Deactivate the "Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Control Method Battery" driver


But that improves only the DPC latency. It is possible that your interface doesn't play nice with the Ricoh FW chip. The current Dells are all not suited well for realtime audio, I'd return it.