Need more notebook speed

Hello all,

I just bought a notebook and I'm having some performance issues. I want to see if u all new what I would need to buy to fix this thing up. I'm having 2 issues. The first is when I run fruity loops program and to much information is running the sound starts to crackle. I'm guessing this the sound card. Can you recommend one that will fix this? The second problem is I bought a secondary monitor and after about 15 minutes of running the laptop crashes and I get a blue screen. Maybe a memory issue or driver problem?

If you guys could tell me if this is fixable and what I would need to buy that would be amazing.

I am running a Toshiba satellite L305D-S5928. AMD athlon X2, ATI Radeon 3100, 3G memory, 320gb harddrive

 

Have you tried external speakers to rule out the sound card vs the speakers?

I don't know whether or not Toshiba have their own built in diagnostics. You can rule out memory with MemTest. Run at least 2-3 passes. If you got no errors, your memory should be good.

 

Yes the issue still happens with external speakers. Do I need a new sound card. And thanks I'll try the memory test

 

Well unfortunately that would require a motherboard replacement? You tried plugging into the headphone jack? You can try a USB sound card but they can get pricey, 30-100 bucks.

 

Yes headphone jack same issue. I don't mind spending the money if it fixes the problem, I didn't even know they had USB sound cards.

 

I've tried the same thing bro with Fruity loops and what-not. My ex best mate used to Dj regularly on the weekends. He had to buy a $150 AU seperate sound card that he could connect to his PC. The crummy little card in his computer didn't have enough IO ports and couldn't handle enough bandwidth. You'll be looking at only stereo quality... nothing anywhere near 44110Hz or anything.

So for that problem you can buy another sound card, preferably one that will work well for FL. On top of that you could try and lower your latency. A huge thing you can do is turn off your wireless, that will considerably lower your latency which will reduce the under-runs 'pops, crackles, drops' in your sound. Turning off anything you don't need, or disabling it will really help.

Google a 'sound latency checker' and get a little 1mb program that will test your latency. Then you can check the level and test what makes it go down the most and you'll also be able to see if it's low enough to get good quality.

Another thing that helps, that isn't really a good idea is you could unplug your AC charger, this also helps on some machines but then you have to run off the battery which isn't good for your battery and doesn't last long with high power sound work. Also check your CPU load, FL takes a ton of CPU usage, make sure the settings are set to use both your CPU's cores.

Either way get a really good Sound Card for about $150.

Post back.

 

That's crazy that's the same exact issue I'm having. Im gonna stop everything else running in the background and see if I still get the same issue. Great info man. Let me test it out.

Any info on the external monitor issue in the mean time?

 

My dad does some sounds editing as well as he has some issues with sound quality. He resolved this issue by getting an external unit from Tascam.

 

Well on the secondary montior you could be overheating or something. How big is the monitor and is your computer fan blaring? Does your laptop get hot? Do you think it's a heat problem?

Take a photo of your bluescreen just for the record.

It's cool bro I've had some experience with the same issue. Try all of what I said and get back to us, good luck. You might have lucked out that I've experienced the same problems Latency is the issue for your sound problems.

P.S. My first piece of Audio equipment was from Tascam, it was an old tape recorder. State of the art back in the day.

 

I had a A300. It is similar to the L305 in its layout. In my case I had sound on the speakers but not on the headphones. The headphone jack was damaged internally. I open the laptop to see if I can fix it but decided against it replacing the jack. The jack has multi soldering points. The only way to remove it without damaging the board is to melt the soldering material in all of them at the same time.
Any ways, I got a usb sound card instead from ebay for £2. I don't do any sound editing and I was more than satisfied with the sound quality of the usb device.

 

You should never use music production/editing programs with built in sound cards really - they're not designed for the sort of low latency, high quality performance you need.

If your budget won't stretch to a real USB audio interface (£50 ish upwards in the UK), then find the free ASIO4ALL drivers to run your built-in interface on ASIO drivers rather than the standard ones, this should improve matters somewhat.

 

Use this DPC Latency Checker -to check if there is issue with drivers, most Dells E6400 had issues with drivers, side effect was as you described. Changing drivers and disabling hardware that was unused (like security hubs etc.) solves this.

Latency spikes should only be in "green" (one, two yellow are acceptable). If its "red" then this is "driver issue".