Success: 828 MKIII on Dell Laptop and XP SP2

[Smokehouse]

I've had an MKII for many years, and recently upgraded to an MKIII. I was dreading upgrading the driver and going through all the hassle of making my system stable, having read threads here for so long. I thought it would be nice to post a good story -- I moved up to MK III and am having no problems. No clicks, pops, mouse freezes, or BSODs.

Dell Latitude D620
ADS Pyro 1394 Port FireWire card
Internal 320 Gigabyte drive
Internal Broadcom gigabit ethernet card
Internal Dell wireless network adaptor
Windows XP Pro SP2

I did a normal XP install and (per the advice on the RME website -- thank you RME) rolled the FireWire drivers back to SP1.
I found that the Broadcom ethernet card was assigned to Int 18, as was the CardBus/FireWire card. I disabled the ethernet card.
(I can use the internal wireless network adaptor if I need to get on the net for something.)
I disabled the IEEE 1394 FireWire "Network" adaptor driver.

Installed the most recent MOTU driver from the Web site.

And it works! Joy.
Recording 18 tracks at 44.1K 24 bits with absolutely no problems.

[majdid]

few questions please:
- did you go through the whole process described by RME, including the registry hack...?
- what latency are you getting and which daw you are using?
- 18 tracks or playback or recording or both?
- did you had enough time to test? i somedays feel that is perfectly working and on the next day everything is f*cked up.

thanks for your feedback

[majdid]

hello?

[Smokehouse]

Sorry for delay. A few days off the grid. Ahhh...

- did you go through the whole process described by RME, including the registry hack...?
I did not do the registry hack. Only the rolling back of the drivers to SP1. My firewire card doesn't support 800, so it didn't seem to be an issue.

- what latency are you getting and which daw you are using?
I'm not going for low latency, since I'm not doing any realtime processing through the PC. Recording multi track, then re-recording certain tracks, doesn't seem to require low latency. I run with a buffer size of 1024 under ASIO at 44.1K and so get (as I recall, but i'd have to go look) something like 44ms. Not a problem for me, but it might be for others.

- 18 tracks or playback or recording or both?
18 tracks of realtime recording from the MOTU unit. Playback is 18 tracks, with effects, mixed down in the DAW software, but played out as stereo (2 tracks) to the MOTU unit. I'm using SONAR Home Studio 4 XL and some plugins.

- did you had enough time to test? i somedays feel that is perfectly working and on the next day everything is f*cked up.
I've used it for four long evenings of recording already -- 5 hour sessions. Not a pop or a whimper. But don't jinx it for me!!

[majdid]

ADS Pyro 1394 Port FireWire card is a PCI card, how are you using it with a laptop? im sure i missed something..

[Smokehouse]

The ADS card I'm using is a PC Card. "Pyro 1394 Port For Notebooks" P/N: API-601

[majdid]

thankx, another question, what is your stock firewire port on the laptop? is it a TI? im actually planning to sell my HP dv6855ee and getting a better laptop that works with the mk3 and having the option to rollback to XP.

[Smokehouse]

The D620 does not have a built-in FireWire port. If it did, I wouldn't use it as I'm pretty sure it's not based on the TI chipset. I can't say I'm happy that MOTU advertises a unit that works with FireWire, then after you get it you find out that it only works with SOME FireWire adaptors. But I've done my crying and I'm moving on.