How do you spell Booyah?
I finally got my DAW computer working today. I got a Dell D630 Core 2 Duo laptop a couple of months ago and have wanted to use it to replace my old Pentium 4 Dimension 3000.
Problems began when the laptop arrived with Windows Vista. ProTools (the DAW software I use) doesn’t work on Vista, so I started by downgrading to Windows XP Pro. Not as easy as you might think, because after paying 75 cold ones for the downgrade, I couldn’t get the XP installation to recognize the hard drive. After spending a weekend with Dell, my local tech support guys, and completely erasing the hard-drive with U.S. Department of Homeland Security approved software, it still didn’t work. Turns out I had to set the hard drive to compatibility mode in the BIOS. After doing that, I got XP installed.
Next I installed ProTools. But, of course, it didn’t work. Playback would randomly terminate, and Stylus RMX would only play back about one note out of every 20. The program kept telling me that it was having resource conflicts with the OS, and I was screaming “You have a Core 2 Duo! You have 2 GB of RAM! How can there be a resource conflict?!”
I contacted Digidesign tech support, and they told me that my machine wasn’t supported and so they wouldn’t do anything. I was ready to give up on it, but I decided to spend this morning messing with it one last time to see if I could find a solution. I disabled the internal network cards and WiFi, and booted up in diagnostic mode. Still nothing. Finally, as a last ditch effort, I disabled dual core support for the processor. That was it! Everything works! Amazing! I was dancing around for a few minutes with Winnie and Jo. After two long months, the thing finally works. It’s a miracle.
In other news, the Ring of Scribes will be featured on the WeasleyCast Halloween special this week. I believe you can tune in to WeasleyCast on iTunes. If you would like to help us out, tune in to the podcast and leave a comment about us.
Hope everyone has a very bad, very sad, disgusting Halloween.
