Gremlins Emerge with Switch to Windows 7

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

Al and others,

I have not yet had the chance to delve into the BIOS, however, I have noticed another issue which I hope might help Windows 7 users.

My Lenovo X201 seems to revert to certain power saving settings every time it restarts.

By going to

> Control Panel
> Device Manager
> Universal Serial Bus controllers
>

I can then see a tree with "Generic USB Hub" at the top and at the bottom "USB Root Hub"

The challenge seems to be no matter how many times I adjust the power scheme settings, repeat the Sweetwater routine etc....

In the Power Management tab of every "USB Root Hub" item,

the box "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power"

is checked. This may not be the only, final piece to the puzzle, however, it seems to make a significant difference when I go through that entire tree and uncheck those boxes.

I otherwise love this laptop and Windows 7 has generally been pretty stable for me.

In our increasingly multi media world, however, I find it pretty ridiculous that I have to manually uncheck several boxes every time I dont want popping, stuttering audio?!

Oh...and one last extra credit question for the experts, please:

In the midst of all of this, I have totally lost track of DVD playback.

I sometimes "rip" my own DVDs to the hard drive, which using XP were easy to playback using Windows Media Player Classic and all the same audio settings I used for music.

Since migrating to Windows 7, however, I can now see the movie, but the only audio is a screechy, staticky, digital which somehow hasn't been decoded sound.

Thanks for all ideas and help.

CW -- re the USB issue, try this.

Not sure what to suggest on the DVD issue.

Best regards,
-- Al

CW,

Regarding the DVD issue: download a copy of VLC media player from here. It seems to be one of the best at playing odd codecs.

Dick