Topic: Lenovo Thinkpad E520 + hdspe expresscard + Multiface= FAIL? (!)

It's a resignated post, almost just for the the record: After 4 days of tweaking and messing around with a brandnew Lenovo Thinkpad Edge E520 (2nd gen core i5, AMD® Radeon™ HD 6630M 1GB, intel HM65 chipset), trying with two hdspe expresscards (both rev 18) and two different MF I (all working fine on other systems), i 'm nearly giving up!

from the beginning on they seem not to get friends: after inserting, the system was mostly quite hangy and  often bluescreened, the mouse pointer movement was interrupted and stopped every second.   

The result I got is: device and driver are installed and recognized (which was an epic 4 hour battle...). I'm not exactly shure what I did but, i disabled some things, waited 20 minutes, and there it was: device manager stated an unrecognized Mediadevice
but still: red light on Multiface, Hdsp settimg window states "i/o box: error", and  crashes with bluescreens when i go to the "about"-tab. Every 4th time i try i got a Bluescreen with Hdsp_64.sy caused a "page fault in none paged area".   Sometimes (happened three times) i got a i/o box connected and can play 2-3 Seconds of Sound before I get a Bluescreen...

So  here a list what I did:
-Tried two different Drivers (3.2.4 and 3.083)
- checked the serial of the newer one of the Expresscards which 22752220 and not on the blacklist (?), anyway i tested it with two different cards...
- installed all available win7 and lenovo updates which were system related
-disabled internal Soundcard in device manager
- deactivated Expresscard power management in bios
- set all performance settings to best performance
-tried all Pcie modes available in bios
- disabled in Bios Bluetooth, Hdmi port, Optical drive, Wlan, Wwan, fingerprint, ... everything except usb and expresscard
- updated Bios and chipset drivers
- changed the priority of the irq 19 (which is the expresscard) to high in the registry
- phoned RME hotline which were quite friendly and helpful but had no useful hint
- phoned Lenovo Hotline which were quite unfriendly and ignorant, had no useful hint and refusing service telling me that "it's the fault of the expresscard vendor"
- reseted the system and started all over again
- tried 3 FW-Cables, just to be shure;)
- Annoyed my girlfriend with spontaneous outbursts like "if i change the Irq's, transfer the secondary Energy to the tachyon-matrix...." 
- banged my head several times against the wall...
- performed black magic in sacrificing and old 386-Laptop in a bloody ritual...


So far no success, and i get some gray hairs more! I read many threads in this forum stating that buying a notebook is a try and error, and can only agree! I miss the times when i used pcmcia and it mostly was like "plug and play"...
I'm not that pro with the inner live of PC laptops and the inner live of Win 7....Did I forget something? Somebody any idea? Except "buy a Mac"


greetings
niel

www.faune.de

www.faune.de

Re: Lenovo Thinkpad E520 + hdspe expresscard + Multiface= FAIL? (!)

Sometimes things are not compatible... As other users will confirm, these Expresscards are not known to be problematic or "choosy"... I'm afraid I still have no simple solution, maybe there is none... Have you got any other Expresscard devices to test with the Lenovo?


Regards
Daniel Fuchs
RME

Regards
Daniel Fuchs
RME

Re: Lenovo Thinkpad E520 + hdspe expresscard + Multiface= FAIL? (!)

Thanks for the fast response! No i got no other expresscards as the two hdspe-cards... perhaps i buy tommorow a cheap one.... i keep on reporting if i got any success...

regards
niel

www.faune.de

4 (edited by georgob 2011-07-20 21:11:12)

Re: Lenovo Thinkpad E520 + hdspe expresscard + Multiface= FAIL? (!)

Hi Niel
I have a lenovo T410, with NVidia graphics, Expresscard MADI,  and the one thing that messed up my performance in dpc latency checker was the grafics driver (I did almost everything you described in your post as well). The NVidia grafics driver has a energy saver switch (called Powermizer) and as soon as I disabled it, all was smooth and nice.
The standard windows VGA driver worked good, too.
You could try changing your grafics driver to windows standard.
Just a guess.
Georg

Re: Lenovo Thinkpad E520 + hdspe expresscard + Multiface= FAIL? (!)

Sounds interesting, thanks for the inspiration! I actually noticed that my radeon grafics device has no interrupt... so did you just removed the driver manually in the device manager?

www.faune.de

Re: Lenovo Thinkpad E520 + hdspe expresscard + Multiface= FAIL? (!)

Yes I deinstalled it and then installed the dafault windows driver.

Re: Lenovo Thinkpad E520 + hdspe expresscard + Multiface= FAIL? (!)

no success with changing the graphics driver....

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