mkok wrote:Glad you fixed it. There’s nearly always something lurking in windows! I’ve never used a laptop for audio but the laptops I have bought have always been bloated with things I don’t want, meaning I have to spend a fair bit of time removing and disabling them.
A good strategy is to always perform a clean Windows installation because factory installations can be very bad.
And then to install only the real necessary driver for the hardware which is not yet covered by the Windows installation (check device manager):
- chipset
- graphic
- LAN
- USB
- WLAN / Bluetooth
- Sound
- Mousepad
and to leave out any add-on tool for e.g.: updating BIOS / chipset / drivers / WLAN management / additional tools for sound like in this case / blower control / ...
After the installation of each driver I check latency with LatencyMon to find out whether I got a bad driver or not.
These tools are quite often badly coded and can even decrease GUI performance and increase also DPC of your system significantly. I had this issue with an otherwise very good Lenovo Laptop of a friend.
It was at that time, where you had small 32GB SSDs built-in as accelerator for Hibernation and Harddisk accesses.
And even this has not been done correctly from the preinstallation from factory. They left out the disk acceleration which is quite important if you have a harddisk and no SSD built-in.
The overall problem with factory installation was, that the performance was so bad, that the mouse cursor only move reluctantly on the screen and the performance was like big shit.
After a proper reinstallation and some tuning for audio (which is beneficial as well for a normal office laptop) everything was fine and the device runs now since about 6y without any issue, I only had to perform a few upgrades here and there (antivirus, macrium reflect).
Finally I made my friend a present and replaced the HD by a SSD because I feared that the HD might fail at some time and now the system became even a little faster.
Tip: before you reinstall make some notes about the installed driver / HW.
For some notebooks you will find sometimes two or three different drivers depending on when the laptop was buillt and what parts were available. This makes it easiser to you to pick the proper drivers and everything goes faster / more smoothly.
If you have a laptop with two disks/SSDs then create a partition for Windows and all applications, sound libs.
User data / project data to another disk / partition.
The prepared folders for "Own files", "Own Music" I move to the saparate disk/partition by opening the properties, to get them out of your profile folder c:\users\loginname\XYZ
This makes it easier to restore a backup from last week with a disk imaging tool like Macrium reflect.
Then all your user data stays in "save harbor" on separate disk / partition.
If there is anything wrong after an upgrade or whatever then you can more easily recover so that also your Windows Registry stays very clean.
As I do not change much in my applications I only have to be careful with my Firefox bookmarks and to export them before doing such a recovery of my Windows installation, otherwise I get the status of bookmarks of the last day/week.
After restoring the system I re-import and all is fine.
If you organize your system well you can perform restores to the last known good working Windows backup within less than 10-15 minutes. Additionally useful here Macrium Reflects feature: "rapid delta restore".
It only writes back those disk blocks that need to be changed, therefore the recovery is ultra fast even on big TB SSDs. Usually its only a little that becomes changed on the Windows partition after an upgrade ...
BR Ramses - UFX III, 12Mic, XTC, ADI-2 Pro FS R BE, RayDAT, X10SRi-F, E5-1680v4, Win10Pro22H2, Cub14