DELL INSPIRON/MOTU 828 - BE WARNED!!!!!!

[Jimfish]

here is a warning to any of yu wanting to use a dell inspiron laptop with a motu 828 firewire soundcard....

I bought my 828 and Inspiron and hooked em up but started getting little pops and crackles like shoddy latency...but i had check all latency related settings etc and they were fine. So i rang motu and they said there is a problem with the dell inspiron that thier irq for the graphics card and firewire ports are the same and this causes problems....motu told me they cannot help as they dont know the inner workings of the dell..

So i rang Dell technical support and after the usual wait i spoke to someone who didnt have the first clue about computers and he even tried to tell me that there was no such thing as a firewire soundcard and firewire was exclusivly for connecting digital cameras!! - this is a technical support expert???
i spoke to 5 people equally as dumbfounded as the first...all any of them could tell me to do was system restore... I rang every department of dell asking for the boss, so i could complain, but got nowhere - they kept poutting me back to the same shitty tech support department...
I am still battling with them now, and i have spent 2 solid days on the phone to them and got nowhere....one girl even broke my fire wire altogethor and couldnt fix it so i had to reinstall windows!!!

Yesterday i found out that Dell have relocated all thier tech supprt to india, dont get me wrong, i am not being racist or anything, but there are practical issues with this... dell are now the largest computer manufacturer in the world and thier technical support division must contain tens of thousands of workers.. and where in a developing country like india are you going to fing thousands of computer experts who are familiar with all the latest tecyhnology and speak perfect english? as far as i can fathom, you are not!

anyway, the long and the short of it is: dont buy an inspiron and an 828!

[Jimfish]

and the other thing is i dare not complain to havily because i dont want any of them to lose thier jobs!

[MARKEG]

pc and 828 = nightmare

i've had no end of probs

[lunatrick]

I was reading a feature on the traktor (pc mixing software) website on matt black from coldcut and he said he uses -
Dell Inspiron 8000, 866 mhz, Win2k

he then went on to say this about soundcards with this laptop :-

(I am now using a ) Roland UM2. Despite much effort have not found an ASIO sound hardware solution that works well on the Dell. Tried MOTU 828, Wami Box, Emagic 2-6, Digigram VXpocket. All have problems.

So it seems you're not alone. Personally if i had tried that many soundcards I would get rid of the dell....but I know it's not quite that simple!

[sinner]

Thats a very common problem with alot of PC gear. There are too few IRQs, and even though in theory its supposed to work correctly with PCI shared IRQs ( such as video and anything else ) , in practice it just doesnt work that way.

I have the exact same problems again and again with all sorts of hardware. The only way I can get around it, is to custom pick every single peice of gear that goes into a PC to make sure it all works with each other.

The only thing I could suggest is to check for a BIOS setting in the laptop that turns off the graphics card IRQ. It may not be possible on a laptop, but its usually possible on desktop systems.

On something important like a sound device, its a good idea to check the manufacturers recommendations for systems before dumping money on a peice of gear. As far as I'm concerned, the sound card is more important than what brand the laptop is anyways ( I dont actually like using laptops though, so I'm probably somewhat biased )

And I agree with Mark, but I would take it a little big farther. PC's and Firewire just dont get along. Even USB can be a bit spotty because of the CPU hit thats taken most of the time to work with USB devices. Because alot of the processing for USB devices is done by the host cpu and not the card itself ( this is not true for all devices ), its really easy to run into resource starvation problems.

[Coleco]

i dont know much about computers and im not sure not if this help but i have a inspiron and it used to make this high pitched hiss and stuff when i recorded. i just thought it was the sound card and left it alone. then one day a was messing around and hooked it up with out the ac cord and ran it off batteries it recorded crystal clear and has ever since

[z0ki]

read the ACPI section...i hope it resolves your issues..

http://www.musicxp.net/installing_tips.htm

tech support people at dell do nothing but read back knowledgebase documents...worthless....but dell warranty is the best (hope you got a lot of it)


-z

[Jimfish]

well cheers everyone...

in the end i swapped my office pc and music laptop over, with a few upgrades for the office one and now everything is working sweet....except my firewire port on the desktop wont read my firewire hard disk (they run the 828 fine) any idea why this is??
the hard disk works fine on any other pc ive ever plugged it into and used to work on my office pc when i had an audigy running its firewire...

cunts