Karaoke Forums

OK, I am a pretty good tech person but this one stumped me. I bought a laptop, Dell Latitude D400 to replace my stolen laptop. I am going to install both VirtualDJ and Hoster, if they ever get me freed up on the registration of my old laptop. I looked at the spec for the software and the minimum is like 1.3GHz processor with 512MB of memory. This one is 1.6GHz and has 1.5GB of memory on it, running WinXP Home.

For now, I am using the headphone output for the sound to mix it with my mixer. It has built in sound chip. However, the music skips. It gives a quick pause of less than a second every 10-15 seconds randomly, which not acceptable. I looked at the tasks and no process is taking much processor time. Majority of the time time, System Idle is at 95%+ so processor is not being overloaded.

So, what I am thinking is that sound chip sucks and need to be by passed. I was thinking about getting a PCMCIA sound card, like Audigy series from Creative. My theory is that off loading the sound process to a better sound chip would prevent it from skipping.

Because of the economy, I don't want to spend the $100 just to experiment. So, has anyone used this set up and found it to work better? If I can get some indication of working, I will go buy the sound card. I thought about external USB sound card but it cost just as much and it's a bigger haul, unless someone can suggest something very reasonable.

Thanks in advance for your wisdom.

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Seize the day and SING!!!

MAKE SURE YOU HAVE ALL OF THE LATEST DRIVER UPDATES. I am running a laptop also and use a usb mixer (mackie) I have never had a skip in it, but I also dont have a skip with the onboard soundcard. Hope this helps......

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I'm Not Dead yet...... But every day Im getting Closer !

I have had four different laptops, one running Hoster and three running CompuHost. Two Dells and two Toshibas, all of lesser spec than yours with XP. In all cases I use the internal sound chip. Never a skip.

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[color=#ffff55]Mickey J.[/color]
Alas for those who never sing, but die with all their music in them.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Wow, it was the driver. Thanks EElvis. I didn't think it was the driver because the machine came with a fresh install of XP with SP1 and I did all the XP update. I would have thought that the driver would be in there. Unfortunately, the certified drivers were version 06 and they had a version 12 on Dell's web site. I downloaded and now it's not skipping. Thanks much for the quick response.

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Seize the day and SING!!!

Audio dropouts arre caused by low resources, cache problems or both. Usually with a resource problem it gets worse after playing a few songs or even gets worse towards the end of a sing. Cache probs are regular. One test I run is with music playing do directx tests. See if if gets worse then it is resources.. In a recent post I provided the link to tune for audio.makesure you are running windows classic..

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