Hi Mathias, thanks for prompt reply.

"The laptops ExpressCard slot is not working as it should" : For a mechanical reason (I have been surprised to see that the express card is not physically latched in the slot, so that a slight accidental traction on the firewire cable can disconnect the card) a Dell technician came to my home two weeks ago and uselessly exchanged the slot for an identical new one. Result : not more latching than before, nor change respectively to freeze problem.

"The ExpressCard overheats" : ?? In my studio the ambiant temperature is about 21 C°. After 50 mn with 4 tracks recording on Digicheck, the card temperature is not more than 45 C° (estimation, contact to finger is pleasant warm). No freeze during this morning. Freeze at 14h32, DigiCheck just open, not recording. The Express card temperature less than 45 C°.

"The ExpressCard is not working as it should" : I suppose I have to contact the reseller (Thomann De), with copy of our messages ? Or RME is interested to examine the card directly ?

Hi,

My opinion is that it isn’t a problem with the express card. I have the similarly troubles with an
other kind of configuration.
It’s more a problem with the laptop and windows. It’s happen that the card get by the system a faulty IRQ. I mean that on the same interrupt hanging some system components they are using the same bus. When you work with the RME ASIO driver you produce a have data transfer on this bus.
When the system component also request data from the same bus, and don’t get them free by signaling over the interrupt and it’s an important system request then the OS freeze and waiting for get the bus free. When you pull the card, then the system unregister the card in the system and give the bus free. 
I have the same troubles and no solution for that problem at the moment.

My configuration is HDSP9652 in an external PCI- box and with an Expresscard PCI Brigde.
Sometime I can record 16 channels for hour, sometime it freezes after 10 minutes.
Playback of 16 channels is not really possible. It freezes after 5 minutes.

Maybe RME have a solution for that problem

Hi,
Laptop: Acer Aspire 8942G Intel Core i7 720QM, 8GB Ram DDR3, 1.2 TB HD
External Box: EXSYS EX-1025
RME: HDSP 9652 Rev. 1.6, last Firmware, last driver

Audio Software: Nuendo 4
with RME Asio problems and freeze and only recording work with less freeze
with build in Asio (full duplex) with bad latency all work, this asio driver use the wdm driver

lg
Matthias

Gildas at Thomann's hotline told me that RME ExpressCard is very seldom in failure (glad !) and sent me to that thread :

http://www..rme-audio.de/forum/viewtopic.php?id=8365

So the problem seems general, and even with many different occurences, seems to be related to discrepancies beetween RME, laptops constructors and even Microsoft understandings of ExpressCards specifications. Compatible ? Sometimes, with some laptops ... Once again, it's probably more often true with the Mac Book than with one out of many PC.

I tried to boot with ExpressCard diconnected then connect. DigiChk freezed after 3 hrs and 30 mn.
Now new trial with total "maximum performances" in Win parameters ; I wait ...

So much time wasted. I'm tired and discouraged.

Carenne

Trying Maximum Performance is a good idea. I don't know what XP does other than changing CPU clock-rates, but in Vista/W7 all profiles other than "High Performance" try to use power-saving on the PCI Express bus and it even leads to dropouts for Firefaces (because Firewire is connected to PCI Express).

Another thing you should try is disconnect *all* external device from the laptop that come with their own PSU or are in any way connected to grounding. That includes powered USB hubs, external displays, external harddrives etc.

You also write that the "freezes" end as soon as you unplug the HDSPe. So the computer itself is not freezing, but Windows stalls? Does Samplitude also recover once you remove the card? Can you still move the mouse?

Please run Task-Manager *before* you do your work then keep it running while you do your work until the stall happens. When the stall happens press CTRL-ALT-DEL, if Windows reacts to that chose to open Task-Manager (which is still active anyway) and try have a look at CPU load (especially for processes). If this doesn't work try running Task-Manager with "Realtime" priority, but that may cause dropouts (change its refresh rate to slow).

Last but not least, when you run Samplitude make sure that you do not use the "High Priority" setting (don't know exactly what it was called), because that makes it run at realtime priority (31, the highest possible). This in turn means that whenever Samplitude stalls/overloads the whole system does.

I don't have experience with the combination of HDSPe + MF1, only with the MF2. To the HDSPe's honor I must say that it is the only ExpressCard that I am not able to cause serious errors or even completely lose connection on both the 2008/09 (Intel G35) and 2010 (Intel GM55) Macbook Pros. The only time I managed to cause a Kernel Panic (like a BSOD) was when I pulled it out during a shutdown of OS X.

Any eSATA card with any chipset I tried plus several Firewire cards were not half as stable in the same test-setup. These tests included discharging the ground voltage level by connecting external devices that come with their own PSU and on. And with the 2009 Macbook Pro (G35) there were very serious issues with all cards but the HDSPe that even happened if you didn't connect anything else and didn't touch the computer. What PCI Express chipset is your new computer using?

That doesn't mean that the HDSPe cannot be the source of your issues, just that in comparison to other ExpressCards I tried it was on top of the heap. To me it seems that ExpressCard integration is handled rather bad regardless of which laptop you try. It surely no coincidence that the port vanishes more and more from laptops (which is a shame). I'm typing this on the Acer of my wife, which comes with 5 USB ports, multi-cardreader, HDMI, VGA, even still an analog modem, but no ExpressCard.