MAKE SURE YOU HAVE FREE IRQS in DEVICE MANAGER for firewire, or it WONT WORK

[sleazypete]

MAKE SURE YOU HAVE FREE IRQS in DEVICE MANAGER for firewire
IF you are considering ANY firewire -mixer options - read carefully, especially about sound on sound and 2-way monitoring -
THEY WILL TRIP YOU UP EVEN THOUGH YOU LAPTOP DOUBLES THE OTHER SPECS
and you think you should be fine

CHECK YOUR DEVICE MANAGER and see if the videocard is on the same IRQ as the firewire - if so DO NOT BUY

If you dont have free IRQs in your PC - you will have to build another one or buy a different laptop to use the firewire

Currently haveing to step backward and build another whole computer just to hand-coddle the MAckie 1220 firewire

good luck getting anyome else to tell you this, even if it would save you thousands of wasted time and money...

and I been working on PCs a LOONG time - your firewire must also have a dedicated interrupt (IRQ) to your processor for 2 streams of monitoring (IN/OUT)

think carefully befor eyou buy, and check your device manager ... if the firewire shares the IRQ with other devices, skip it -

that PC is NOT made for audio production and will be a real pain for you...probably will not work at all

in Xp, go administrative tools, device manager (in left frame of window) choose view from upper menu, then view by resource, select IRQ from list on right -

this should give you a list of all IRQs and the devices assigned to them ... in my case, 9-10 devices (USB ports, videocard, modem, net card, etc) were all set to 11, the same as the firewire (this is not a lowend laptop either, but Fujitsus top of the line)

many desktops assign one IRQ to each device, but laptops set these and many times THEY CANNOT EVER BE CHANGED!!

I tried the PCMCIA workaround, as instructed by Mackie, and GUESS WHAT!! SAME IRQ ASSIGNED -

This means this laptop (and MANY OTHERS) will NEVER be able to do 2-way monitoring and allow overdubbing.

if you are looking for firewire and PC, build a desktop .... of course, if you have a PCI slot, why use firewire??

DONT GET BURNED BY MACKIE AND OTHER FIREWIRE CLAIMS TO WORK WITH ALL LAPTOPS. VERY FEW laptop PCs WILL ACTUALLY DO the 2-way monitoring necessary to do overdubs - (also steer away from small footprint motherboards, VAOIs, super-small form factor, etc.)