Windows 7 Headache

DJ Life & Community General Discussion
1

Windows 7 Headache

Hey all…this is more an opportunity to vent my rage so bare with me..

Just received my shiny new Dell 1557 i7 laptop with Windows 7 64bit Professional installed, 6gb RAM. Super quick in OS, screen is 15.6" 1080p and looks niiiiiiiice. Blu Ray recorder too. Basically a very nice laptop.

Problem 1:
Behringer. NO 64 bit driver support for my lil’ BCD 3000.
Tried various versions of drivers, compatibility modes etc but nope, even Behringer themselves say DON’T BOTHER! Almost funny, but mostly annoying as I really need to get a working system for my next set on Wednesday. Argh.

Problem 2:
M-Audio Ozone. This time, drivers are available. Great!
Oh. Wait. Not so great. Vista 64bit drivers install..then don’t support MIDI in or out. Search a bit more…aha..Windows 7, 64bit drivers! Download-install-fail. Thanks. No dice :confused: Double argh.
(this is for my Record/Reason install..not technically DJing related but a major use for my laptop)

Solution 1:
Slightly long winded but I get to keep my nice laptop:
Dual boot Windows 7 32bit which means loosing access to 2Gb of RAM & a fair bit of faff.

Solution 2:
Rather drastic but would be SO much simpler.
Return Dell under their “£20 to return in under 7 days deal” and buy a Apple Mac Book Pro 17".
Everything works under Macs’, right???

Any suggestions or similar tales of woe out there?

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You should dual boot and install leopard on another partition. When my macbook pro was down, I took my brothers asus laptop installed leopard… and the BCD sound card and traktor pro worked flawlessly. (you just need to buy a copy of mac osx and look up how to dual boot).

I don’t blame windows for the BCD not working, behringer has always had shit drivers for it and back in the day when I used XP i could never get the damn thing working properly.(if it didn’t blue screen, it would just stop playback after 10 seconds or so)

I found using the mac osx was the only solution for using my bcd with the included sound card.

If you do the dual boot on your laptop you will have a fast machine with mac osx for waaaaay cheaper than apple will sell a similar machine for. (dual booting mac osx is not a new concept this has been done for quite some time so there should be plenty of resources out the and its a lot easier nowadays).

Good luck! Sounds like a sweet laptop!

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Thanks for the reply, it’s given some hope where there was none!
Been digging around the Hackintosh sites but no one has approached i7 laptops as far as I can tell.
For simplicitys sake I’m going to try a dual boot of Win7 32 bit, I’ll report back with my findings…