Brand new i5 Dell Latitude hugely under performing against old Dell Vostro

DJ Life & Community General Discussion
1

Brand new i5 Dell Latitude hugely under performing against old Dell Vostro

Both laptops have their own dedicated Traktor partition.

Old Dell Vostro 17", 2.2ghz dual core 3mb ddr2 ram, 32bit W7. Heavily optimised and a script I run (not currently running for the test) that closes background tasks such as wireless, spooler, etc.

vs.

Brand new Dell Latitude, core i5, 4gb ddr3 ram, 64bit W7. Heavily optimised, script is running for the test. Brand new install of Windows. Brand new everything.

The Vostro which is about 6 years old, with Traktor running and currently analysing hundreds of tracks, using the “DPC Latency Checker”, is idling around 230ms and no big spikes. Traktor runs smoothly (unless I start dragging files from the other drive inside, but no biggy). No drop outs. No crashes. Everything ok.

New Latitude, with the script running and not even Traktor open, the “DPC Latency Checker” is idling around 1500ms!!! Its barely coming under 100ms. When I open Traktor and play a remix sample for a test and I move the volume fader on my VCI-100, it stutters visually and cuts out the audio very obviously. There looks to be some pattern with the latency checker, where it goes up to around 2000ms and then gradually comes down to just under 1000ms and then goes back up again. I cant screen shot, but its a very obvious pattern.

With a fresh restart and nothing running on either machine:

Vostro idles around 1-4% CPU usage and 644mb RAM
Latitude idles on 0% CPU usage with 684mb RAM.

When the Vostro does spike to around 90% CPU, the latency stays stable.
The Latitude does not spike CPU.

Any clues, at all?

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can you post links for both machines, then we may be able to shed some light on it as the full specs help plus in the past i found windows on 64 bit form was not much good but that may have changed in recent years ive been a mac user since 2007.

3

Can you elaborate on what you mean by links to both machines, please?

4

website links for each machine as just stating the basic specs doesn’t give much of an idea as dell does 22 corei5 dell latitude laptops all with 4gb ram, so a link to exact machines for both.

5

I’m using “LatencyMon” and have found offenders. I’m in the process of restoring my laptop prior to a huge Windows Update. I have read that at least 1 of the 3 over 1ms, may well just be innocent bystanders waiting for a driver to start or something. So, it looks like a painstaking process I have ahead =)

I’ll report back.

6

I’ve been running an older Vostro Core2Duo and more recently a new Vostro i7. The older Vostro has decent latency specs but I remember having to update the BIOS a couple of times before it got that way. The last update seemed to smooth everything out. I also remember that disabling ‘ÁCPI compliant control method battery’ (or similar) in Device Manager sorted out a lot of DPC latency spikes with the earlier BIOS versions. At the risk of stating the obvious, make sure you’re running the absolute latest version of the BIOS and other drivers available from Dell. My newer i7 Vostro has very good DPC Latency specs straight out of the box. I suspect Dell is paying some attention to these issues these days. Also, make sure to disable your webcam in Device Manager too.

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Acpi caused spikes at every 15 seconds on my machine.

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Make sure to turn off ACPI in BIOS and not just device manager, if that was not clear from the other posts…you can do some BIOs tweaking with your power settings to make sure your machine isn’t holding back anything.

Its kind of a shame that all the stuff that used to be accessible through windows is now hidden behind closed doors just to try to get 898798787 million hours of battery life.

9

THIS! i had huge problems with my old hp until i did this.. afterwards i didnt even have to run the optimising script

10

For the sake of any Google searches, I sorted my issue. A bad driver was the issue for the SD card. It was the latest one, so couldnt sort it out. Killed it in device manager. Who takes pictures anyway? :wink:

11

nice to see you back :slight_smile:

12

yay