Acer Aspire 3004WLMI from COMET

Spilt_Milk

Hi all,

I brought my Acer Aspire 2 months ago and want to use it for portable audio recording.

I have a pro audio USB audi interface (Tascam US-122) running with it for doing this.

The problem I had was that I was getting audio glitches when running audio software when I interacted with anything on screen.such as scrolling or opening menus.

I spent a week trying all sorts of things - too much to explain here. I had thought it was the audio interface or a slow USB bus but then I discovered it was the fault of the onboard graphics card.

This article led me to think this: http://www.zefiro.com/vgakills.txt

"Most audio cards use ISA/DMA to trickle samples over the bus one word
at a time. Even PCI cards such as the AMIII can be hurt by this problem
because they trickle the data over the bus in tiny PCI transfers. When
another device illegally locks up the bus for more than 1/88200th of a
second, there's a good chance you will lose audio samples resulting an a
glitch in the recording or playback."

In this case the SIS M760 Drivers (onboard graphics) are locking up the bus.

I found out how to force the Windows XP VGA driver to load instead of the SIS driver. With this driver loaded there are no audio problems at all. My sequencer works perfectly.

The problem is now though that my display is dodgy. no matter what res I use text looks smudged and the screen redraws much slower. Also with that driver loaded you cannot hibernate or standyby your machine.

I am pretty lost now. I'm probably just gonna have to get rid of the thing on ebay and buy a new machine at a loss.

I knew this graphic cards was nothing special but I thought as I'm not playing games it wouldn't bother me - how wrong I was.

Its over a month since I brought this laptop. Do you think I could still return it to Comet at this late stage?

I'm going to ring Comet and see what they say.

Any advice or pointers would be really appreciated.

fguk

That is interesting information. Not come across this recently, but certainly in the bad old days, PCI, VESA, ISA and IRQ issues caused a lot of problems with this sort of thing.

On to your problem.

1) Have you tried ACER, or SIS for an updated driver, which might not cause this problem? A long shot, but you never know.

2) Comet wont be obliged to take it back under the Sale of Goods Act. It is of merchantable quality, with only a small issue that very few users will come across. If it was sold as an Audio editing/capturing machine, then there may be an argument to be had! They may try and help you out for goodwill purposes, but I wouldnt hold my breath.

Spilt_Milk

Rang Comet and they won't have it back. Which is fair enough.

Acer couldn't really help - they mentioned getting latest driver, which I had already done, and the guy said at a last step I might be able to find an unnoficcial one.

I've stuck on ebay. Such shame becaue it was a cracking unit and spec - shame to loose it to a crappy driver.

you lives and learns

seanyseansean

In the BIOS there might be an option for pci clock latency - if there is then adjusting this either up or down may help. It does work for some soundblasters whos drivers hog the pci bus, as well as my freeview cards. HTH.

joemardo1

Hi,

Go to this website and the "off topic" forum on it.

http://www.pgmusic.com/ubbthreads/postlist.php?Cat=0&Board=UBB4

A lot of very helpful people there. What are you using cubase or other software package?

Xp has to be set up correectly for audio optimisation, But I suppose you have done that already. And using the right asio drivers important as well.
Try the forum above. Very good

Joe