New Dell M4800 Laptop MOTU 4Pre - HELP

[jonasd914]

New Laptop, New 4Pre, pops, clicks, warbled audio!

Please read before responding, THANK YOU!
I'm a long time Windows recording guy, and have had many interfaces, 1394, USB, LightPipe, etc...
But, now I am not doing recording anymore, I'm using laptops and audio hardware to do sound system measurements.
I just bought a brand new Dell M4800 laptop, with a new i7 4800MQ CPU, a nice high end machine. JUST so I can use the MOTU 4Pre as my 4 channel mic pre audio interface.

So far, I can't make it work on this new laptop with Win7/64 at all.
I first tried the latest drivers, and when I connect it, the CueMix software sort of sees it. It knows it's there, but sometimes it doesn't really connect with it and won't control anything.
I won't go into my proprietary audio measurement software, I'll just talk about iTunes to keep it simple. If I play anything generated by the PC, it has sample rate "warble" with accompanying pops and clicks.
I've tried different sample rates, and even the older drivers, and it's the same mess every time.

As a test, I just installed the last XP compatible drivers for it on my old XP laptop, and the 4Pre works fine on it. So, this is obviously an issue with Win7/64 and/or my new laptop.

I'm using the USB connection, and would really, REALLY like to get this to work. Please advise if you have anything good to suggest.
I put in a support ticket with MOTU, but I have my doubts if I'll get anything helpful.

[jonasd914]

To add, I've ran DPC latency checker and it seems in good standing, everything below the 50% green area.

[jonasd914]

Okay, wow. After writing this post, in about 15 minutes, I seem to have fixed it. I went into the bios and disabled Intel Speedstep. I meant to also disable USB3, but I forgot and when I rebooted, it was like magic, it started to work like expected, no warbles, pops, clicks, my measurement software works, wow.

I'm bummed because I flew from California to D.C. to do a job and couldn't use my new box/laptop today. I had to use my 7 year old XP laptop and Presonus Firewire box to do the job.
I was really looking foward to digitally controllable and recallable mic pres. Oh well. The job is done, and it appears I may be able to do my next few jobs with my new box.

If you care, I'll post an update at some point.

[jonasd914]

I did something stupid after it was working... I tried the new drivers again on my WIn7/64 machine. oops.

After that, it didn't fully communicate with the 4Pre and Windows couldn't play audio through it.

I went back to 4.0.5.5333 and it was still doing the same thing.
I unplugged, powered off, restarted, still wouldn't send audio or communicate correctly with CueMix.

I went back into the BIOS and disabled the USB3 adapter, rebooted, and again, now it works with 4.0.5.5333. I'm afraid to try anything else.

[jonasd914]

From MOTU:
"Added by Campbell on 2013/11/05 14:34:21 US/Eastern
Hi Jonas,

There's no real reason to update your driver if everything is working as expected at this point. USB 3.0 connection issues are less common now than they were 1-2 years ago, but this depends entirely on the manufacturer of the USB3 controller on the computer in question.

As I mentioned earlier, Windows 8 resolved this issue by implementing native USB 3.0 support in the operating system. Please let me know if you have any other questions!

Best,
Campbell"

So, take that for what it's worth...

[jonasd914]

Update:
So, I've left the older XP compatible driver on my new M48000 Win7/64 laptop, with Intel SpeedStep and USB3 disabled, and it appears to be stable enough to work with.

There still have been a couple times something went wrong and had to restart it.