Crazy Latency in Dell Studio laptops

[#4]

I have been getting the weird kind of latency problem in my Dell studio laptop. I am not the only one but most of the dell studio users are under the same problem and from the past one year this annoying problem couldn’t find a permanent fix at all. Posted several threads on Dell forums but it never helped me to get the permanent fix. I am a Windows 7 user.

[Gaganvihari]

I tested my laptop with Windows Vista. My maximum values were approximately 1000μs. Many also lower. What has reduced my values then immensely: I turned off the sidebar. Since then I had hardly a value greater than 500μs. This effect can be assigned to any but clearly Sidebar Gadget. Even if I only had one active, the values have been worse. But even with sidebar on the program tells me: "This machine should be able to handle real-time streaming of audio and / or video data without drop-outs". So seems to be OK.

[HamsiniI]

So this time I tested with my laptop with Vista. My maximum values were approximately 1000μs. Many also lower. What has reduced my values then immensely: I turned off the sidebar. Since then I had hardly a value greater than 500μs. This effect can be assigned to any but clearly Sidebar Gadget. Even if I only had one active, the values have been worse. But even with sidebar on the program tells me: "This machine should be able to handle real-time streaming of audio and / or video data without drop-outs". So seems to be OK.

[Aalap]

It seems indeed a problem in the Dell - devices in conjunction with audio real-time applications to give.

Maybe there is even a statement from Dell in this regard.

[Donatien]

Due to the serious problem of high latencies generated by the generic OS drivers imposed on the audio programs, the audio software manufacturers were forced to develop solutions for this. So invented the protocol: the ASIO driver. This type of protocol or sound driver, is designed for the audio program can bypass the system of communication with the sound card provided by the operating system itself (generic audio driver) and can communicate directly with your sound card, thus obtaining a direct data flow with this and therefore a much lower latency. So make sure that your sound card has ASIO driver.

[Mahalingam]

Steinberg developed the ASIO standard as an open protocol and therefore could be adopted by manufacturers of audio cards and programs, so it was eventually used by (now all) audio card manufacturers or semi-professional and Windows environment and also for all the audio programs on the market. Therefore when selecting a sound card is essential that this ASIO driver be available.

[Sasuke Uchiha]

In my laptop I have noticed that if the laptop is on battery power, the BIOS will automatically switch from the second graphics card to integrated one in order to save power. But you have to manually start the BIOS to enable the dedicated graphics card again. For me, no problem, but for an "average user" who does not want to deal with the computer architecture could be a huge problem.

[KennedII]

I have a DELL laptop that I use for live performance sound. The handset interfaces with an external soundcard (Alesis MultiMix 8) via firewire. I too had problem with the latency but I solved it. The key point was to disable the Powermizer, a feature of NVidia graphics cards that apparently caused a sort of impasse in communication with the firewire. To do this I used a little program called Switch Powermizer