Ableton CPU going crazy on decent spec laptop?

[matb123]

Hi all,

Got my laptop today and loaded up one of my old projects and the CPU was hitting about 150% :S

The strange thing is even when the song is not playing the CPU is jumping all over the place roughly 70%...

My laptop spec is showing:

Intel Core 2 Duo

2.84 gig of RAM.

I know its not amazing but thats surely not right?

If anyone could possibly help me it would be greatly appreciated.

[dalvare1]

might be a VST...

mine runs at 10-15%, then turn glitch on and its like im using a processor out of an Atari lol

[matb123]

Don't think it is mate...

I transferred everything off my pc to my laptop so all the vsts in the laptop project are the exact same vsts running on the project on the pc and on the pc the CPU doesn't really go above 70% but with the laptop its pushing on 200% lol

[Heartless]

Well what are the specs of your old CPU and the new one?

[matb123]

Well what are the specs of your old CPU and the new one?

On the system preferences of this pc is says:

Pentium Dual-Core

1.99 gig of RAM

This is what is so strange lol it appears that the spec is better on the laptop :S

Could it be the fact that I am using the in built shitty realtek high definition audio driver?

[Gurnumsbug]

Weird your laptop is better than mine..(2gb ram, intel(r) celeron(r) cpu) & I've never had a project go over 100%...& the only time it hit that hard was when I was using a very cpu hungry vst

[Heartless]

Well what are the specs of your old CPU and the new one?

On the system preferences of this pc is says:

Pentium Dual-Core

1.99 gig of RAM

This is what is so strange lol it appears that the spec is better on the laptop :S

Could it be the fact that I am using the in built shitty realtek high definition audio driver?

How many Ghz are the processors?

[matb123]

Well what are the specs of your old CPU and the new one?

On the system preferences of this pc is says:

Pentium Dual-Core

1.99 gig of RAM

This is what is so strange lol it appears that the spec is better on the laptop :S

Could it be the fact that I am using the in built shitty realtek high definition audio driver?

How many Ghz are the processors?

The PC is 2.50Ghz and the laptop is 2.00Ghz

[Heartless]

Well what are the specs of your old CPU and the new one?

On the system preferences of this pc is says:

Pentium Dual-Core

1.99 gig of RAM

This is what is so strange lol it appears that the spec is better on the laptop :S

Could it be the fact that I am using the in built shitty realtek high definition audio driver?

How many Ghz are the processors?

The PC is 2.50Ghz and the laptop is 2.00Ghz

2.5 > 2.0
Your laptop may have more RAM but it's CPU isn't as fast.

[matb123]

Well what are the specs of your old CPU and the new one?

On the system preferences of this pc is says:

Pentium Dual-Core

1.99 gig of RAM

This is what is so strange lol it appears that the spec is better on the laptop :S

Could it be the fact that I am using the in built shitty realtek high definition audio driver?

How many Ghz are the processors?

The PC is 2.50Ghz and the laptop is 2.00Ghz

2.5 > 2.0
Your laptop may have more RAM but it's CPU isn't as fast.

Ahh screwing mann, no way of resolving this then?

[Heartless]

What I'd try is to stop all unnecessary programs and services. This may be common knowledge to you but to a lot, and I mean a lot, of people it's not. Computers often get bogged down with a lot of crap that runs in the background and eats up your CPU. Even brand new computers come with a lot of bundled software and services.

Assuming you are using Windows..

To turn all that garbage off, click the Start button, and depending on what version of Windows you are using, click Run or the search box in search version and type in "msconfig".
Hit the Services tab, Check "Hide All Microsoft Services" at the bottom, then uncheck all the services that remain. Then click the Startup tab and uncheck everything. Restart your computer.

That should free up your CPU a bit. Not sure if it will be enough to get your project running normally. If not, you'll have to Freeze some tracks or bounce them. It's not the end of the world, a 2ghz dual core CPU is fine, just can't load up as many plugins as you used to. Also, if you still have your desktop, I'd use that as your machine for surfing the web and whatnot and restrict your laptop to producing.

[stompzi]

Make sure you're 100% up to date on patches. There was a version of 8, I don't remember exactly which, that had weird bugs that made stupidly high CPU usage on my machine, that went away in a later patch.

[symmetricalsounds]

Could it be the fact that I am using the in built shitty realtek high definition audio driver?

get the asio4all drivers

also what speed is your hard drive? most laptop drives are 5400rpm which is no good for audio, need 7200rpm.

[Heartless]

Could it be the fact that I am using the in built shitty realtek high definition audio driver?

get the asio4all drivers

also what speed is your hard drive? most laptop drives are 5400rpm which is no good for audio, need 7200rpm.

5400rpm is fine. If drive speed becomes that big of a problem, you can just load the audio files into RAM.

[symmetricalsounds]

na man, 5400rpm drives just cant handle any serious audio work.

[VirtualMark]

i can run over 100 instances of massive on my pc, its awesome! 5ghz quad core i7. i'd recommend it over a shitty old pentium dual core anyday.

[VirtualMark]

na man, 5400rpm drives just cant handle any serious audio work.

my laptop is fine with a 5400rpm drive. the only way this could be a problem is if you was using a lot of samples direct from the disk, but i use kontakt and you can just load them into memory. soft synths use ram, and so do effects. the bottleneck on 99.9% of systems will be the cpu when using music software.

[Heartless]

na man, 5400rpm drives just cant handle any serious audio work.

Homeboy has a 2ghz dual core and 2.8gb of RAM. If we're going to start talking about a "serious" setup, he'd need to upgrade everything.

[symmetricalsounds]

yeah fair point, i had a similar setup and as soon as you bounce a few tracks you're gonna get into slowdown due to the drive, obviously if you keep everything in midi it's not an issue but that's a limiting.