Gremlins Emerge with Switch to Windows 7

Al,

You were right - but I made a mistake when I first tried to implement your fix.

I spent some time changing the power settings and choosing the preset menu for "maximum performance" and making sure that the sleep and hibernate features etc were all disabled.

As I mentiioned, things seemed better. But today was the worst sputtering and popping ever, despite "maximum performnance" power settings.

In the end - and you also mentioned this - the real culprit seems to be not the various sleep and hibernation options, but primarily the "throttling" of the CPU which is only found buried in the "advanced power settings."

So when the CPU options are expanded and set to minimum performance = 100 - that seemed to - at last - solve the problem, at least for now. It was otherwise unlistenable much of the time.

I will be curious to see if changing the CPU setting ONLY, while otherwise allowing the machine to sleep, hibernate etc might also work.

Thanks again and I hope this helps other Windows 7 64 bit users.

Great! Thanks for letting us know.

Best regards,
-- Al

Never thought we could improve upon the expertise of Al, but here is everything you need, in one clear and easy to understand document:

http://www.sweetwater.com/sweetcare/downloads/Windows_7_Optimization_Guide.pdf

I am still testing but this has gotten me to the next level of clarity and quiet.

I may have mentioned that my latest notebook is a Lenovo X201 if anyone knows how to get to the BIOS.

The final step in the Sweetwater guide is double checking any CPU power management policies which may be disabled only in the BIOS.

Al thanks again and good luck to everyone who would like better sound from their PC.

Some computers work fine with Win7 and audio streaming (including HiFace) and others dont. May have something to do with AMD versus Intel etc. May be Microsofts fault, who knows. Even Microsofts driver for Gordons interface has caused some issues.

Just spend $500 and get a Mac Mini, or if you cant deal with Mac go back to XP or Vista. Solves all of this.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

CW, thanks for the nice words, and for finding and providing the link.

According to this hardware maintenance manual, bios setup on the X201 is entered by pressing the F1 key when the ThinkPad logo appears following turn-on.

Many of the suggestions in the Sweetwater document look good, but I'm not so sure about some of them. Such as disabling ALL startup items and ALL non-Microsoft services in msconfig, and adjusting processor resource allocations for best performance of background processes instead of programs.

In any event, if you have problems as a result of any of these changes you should be able to get back to where you were via System Restore, which in the unlikely event that a change renders the computer unbootable can be run by booting into Safe Mode. Safe Mode is run by pressing F8 before the Windows logo appears at startup.

Best regards,
-- Al