Kara-Moon Forum

They never come around enough, and when they do, sometimes not soon enough.

I was working on my rig again today. Since I bought the Hum-x (by Ebtech; a dandy little gadget that filters out noise. Plugged in between my laptop adaptor plug and surge protector. Works great!), I've been using the ac adapter on my lap top instead of the battery. Today, I locked up XP to the point it wouldn't even shut off. I would have normally just shut off the power source, but with a laptop, you gotta pull out the battery. 

Well, I decided to leave it out, plugged in the laptop, and got back to work. Well, guess what, improved performance. Lowered the latency to 4ms, still no pops or clicks. Added some more instruments. Still no problems. Increased sample rate. Still no problems. Now I'm loaded up to the point that just playing the piano is putting me over 50% cpu. Still no problems.

The battery must have been sending some kind of underpower condition even with the adapter plugged in.

The piano, to my ears, still doesn't sound as good as through the PC, but its not that bad, and I'll get around it. Good news is, everything else is working great.

If your using a laptop, you might want to try taking out the battery and just use the AC adapter to see if it improves performance.

That's something I've never heard before...
Perhaps the laptop shuts of power management (XP service) when there is no battery ?
I allso had a laptop before who adjusted CPU speed in function of the power that was available, I suspect it must be something simular ?

Very interesting....

k

You could be right. Actually, if someone told me taking out the battery would improve performance, I might not have believed them. Surprised the heck out of me, but the laptop is cooking now!