Laptop Upgrade Help

[GRAYSKALE]

Basically, I'm a poor as fuck student, so I don't have the dollar to buy a nice plush new laptop, but I'm having a problem at the moment that when i try layering multiple vst's and fx the cpu load goes well into the 70's and fucks everything up. What i want to do is perhaps upgrade the ram or something, i have 2gb at the moment, and recon maybe 4gb would do the trick. Just wondered if anybody had any ideas on how I could maximise my computers performance and also help on what i should be looking for with regards to buying ram.
Cheers

[IndigoChild]

if your CPU goes up to 70% that means its your processor that cant handle it , replacing a CPU in a laptop is pretty rare , try and buy a second hand computer somewhere with better specs than your lappy

[deadly_habit]

is your computer xp based or vista?
http://www.audioforums.com/resources/wi ... ation.html
http://www.audioforums.com/windows-vist ... zation.php

[mistayif]

i get this problem too.
in ableton 8 when i've got around 10 - 15 tracks of audio and vsts with effects on each, when playing back, the cpu load meter constantly fluctuates between 20% and 80% and is never stable, there is crackling in the sound and some audio dropout.

i'm running xp professional sp3 and have 4gb memory (i know that the 32bit of xp will only recognise 3GB of it) and i know that the laptop processor can handle what i'm doing because its a dual core intel 2.4ghz processor. i've tried playing the same project on my mates desktop and it plays flawlessly and his specs are 1ghz ram and 2ghz single core processor. any ideas what i could do to better the audio performance of my lappy?

[rook]

i get this problem too.
in ableton 8 when i've got around 10 - 15 tracks of audio and vsts with effects on each, when playing back, the cpu load meter constantly fluctuates between 20% and 80% and is never stable, there is crackling in the sound and some audio dropout.

i'm running xp professional sp3 and have 4gb memory (i know that the 32bit of xp will only recognise 3GB of it) and i know that the laptop processor can handle what i'm doing because its a dual core intel 2.4ghz processor. i've tried playing the same project on my mates desktop and it plays flawlessly and his specs are 1ghz ram and 2ghz single core processor. any ideas what i could do to better the audio performance of my lappy?

I'm assuming you've already tried changing buffer size.
I'm not sure if it's relevant to your problem but I know dual cores sometimes trip up certain apps, you could try opening the DAW. Open task manager, right click the task name and go set affinity and uncheck the secondary processor(s).

No guarantee but it's solved similar problems for me in the past on my quad core desktop.



edit: I've also had CPU spikes up to 100% when it's been running too hot. Got some canned air and cleaned off the heat sink and it dropped back down to 10-20%

[my_fickle_eye]

if you have not already I would recommend trying out the asio4all drivers http://www.asio4all.com/ and making the buffersize as big as possible, although this will render your midi keyboard pretty useless!

[mistayif]

i get this problem too.
in ableton 8 when i've got around 10 - 15 tracks of audio and vsts with effects on each, when playing back, the cpu load meter constantly fluctuates between 20% and 80% and is never stable, there is crackling in the sound and some audio dropout.

i'm running xp professional sp3 and have 4gb memory (i know that the 32bit of xp will only recognise 3GB of it) and i know that the laptop processor can handle what i'm doing because its a dual core intel 2.4ghz processor. i've tried playing the same project on my mates desktop and it plays flawlessly and his specs are 1ghz ram and 2ghz single core processor. any ideas what i could do to better the audio performance of my lappy?

I'm assuming you've already tried changing buffer size.
I'm not sure if it's relevant to your problem but I know dual cores sometimes trip up certain apps, you could try opening the DAW. Open task manager, right click the task name and go set affinity and uncheck the secondary processor(s).

No guarantee but it's solved similar problems for me in the past on my quad core desktop.



edit: I've also had CPU spikes up to 100% when it's been running too hot. Got some canned air and cleaned off the heat sink and it dropped back down to 10-20%

i'll try the task manager thing. i've got one of those laptop stands with a built in usb fan underneath it which is always on when i produce so i don't think heat's gonna be that much of a problem