seems to respond pretty good when I have Ableton running

I'll see if I can get rid of those occasional yellow spikes that happen every 5 minutes or so
Do that whole disable this and that in your hardware menu to minimize hiccups

I tried going down the XPerf path BUT this is on a 32 bit XP machine and it looks like I'll have to go through some hoops to get XPerf running on there (if it's even possible)

That should be fine for the samples I just need something that

-won't crash
-has good drivers
-sounds good
-little to no delay when I'm playing keyboard through Ableton

which it seems like the Babyface should be able to get for me

It never spikes red so I'm taking that as a good sign...... Fingers crossed that I won't have to spring for a new laptop

it's kind of sad that there doesn't seem to be a very good guideline to really follow with PC laptops and audio interface in general..

It's just kind of a crap shoot unless you get a like specifically made for audio laptop....

I'm in the states so it'll be a couple before I get to test it out but once I get it going on my d820 I'll repost with my experience

That's awesome thank you :-)
I really appreciate your responsiveness as well... That's a pretty rare thing to find..

I'll be putting in a pre-order for one of these today probably...
So I'll come back mid February or so with my results

HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM

So I might just be screwed as far as the laptop is concerned I acquired a Babyface and I'm having a lot of the same issues using it in Ableton as the Mackie Black Onyx I was using. In that after like 5 minutes of use a lot of times the CPU meter in Ableton starts to peak and report like 160 percent CPU use and it just stops working all together (I've posted this question in the ABleton forum so we'll see what they say)
http://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=159593

I installed the Babyface on an HP Desktop I have that's pretty much the same specs

laptop is 1.66 GHZ with 3 gigs of ram
desktop is 1.86 GHZ with 1 gig of ram

and it seems to work great on the desktop (the lowest samples I can get are 256 though)
But still Ableton never freaks out and dies.

On the laptop the best I've been able to get reliably is 512 samples anything lower will cause pops and clicks every 15 or 20 seconds of playing. And even then if I play like 4 or 5 notes at a time it clicks a little bit.

I've tried everything I can imagine on the laptop
-babyface Firmware is updated
-babyface drivers are updated
-I made sure the Babyface is running on it's own USB2 enhanced controller
-updated drivers for the intel based USB controller
-stopped all processes I could find from running in the background

and at no point did any of those affect the performance of the unit in ableton on the laptop :-(

the only thing I've been able to see a minimal improvement from is if I set the CPU Priority to Realtime (thanks for that)
and if I stop a few services... I used Process MOnitor to see what services do stuff while I was sitting there and anything that wasn't related to Audio I just killed... The ones I think that helped were some background process NVIdia had running, my printer, disabling all my network controllers, and jqs (some java thing)

it's still weird though cause when using some instruments ableton just sits at like 60 percent even if I'm not doing anything. Where as the same instruments on the other computer cause ableton to sit at 2 percent. I have no idea what it's doing... It's bizarre :-/

I kind of need a new laptop anyway I guess I'll just get one and see what happens.
In the mean time though any additional thoughts would be useful. I have a show I was hoping to use this for on 3/3 and as is I'm a little scared. I might just use the onboard sound card... The latency blows but it never clicks or crashes ableton...   The laptop just seems to hate USB based audio interfaces.

alright I just gave up

I tweaked the hell out of the D820 and I think it's impossible :-)
for me at least
maybe if I reformatted it the whole thing and went fresh

ended up buying a Lenovo Edge 14 for about 600
cheap enough

thing runs at 96 samples now and never skips a beat so yay for that