Re: [Flexradio] Flex 3000 with Windows 7 observation (garbling audio)

[Brett Gazdzinski]

With Neal's low cost computer, my dpc runs around 15 I think, and the 
highest I ever had it go was about 50 .
Been using it with the flex 5000 very much, loads of operating, at high 
power, and have yet to have a single glitch of any kind, for about 3 months!

Not sure how it works, but I used to run the radio off my vista laptop with 
the built in firewire port, without any glitches, even with higher dpc's but 
latency was very high and the audio monitor was useless.

The Sony laptop has a TI firewire chipset with nothing else on the IRQ....so 
no glitches, just slow....

Brett




----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Neal Campbell" <nealk...@gmail.com>
To: "Al Konschak" <w...@konschak.org>
Cc: <flexradio@flex-radio.biz>
Sent: Sunday, February 07, 2010 5:09 PM
Subject: Re: [Flexradio] Flex 3000 with Windows 7 observation (garbling 
audio)


Hi Al

I think you may be making a judgment based on a correlation which is that 
if
it runs well on XP but not on Win7 it must be that Flex driver has a 
problem
with Win7. What I think you are seeing, however, is the effect of Win 7 on 
a
system that ran well under XP!

On my computers I see a 3x to 4x increase in DPCs running Win7 versus XP 
Pro
on the exact hardware. The issue is that Win7 is a much larger operating
system than XP and therefore takes up much more resources (and hence is 
less
"real-time" than XP is.

You can try to tune Win7 to get it out of the way as much as possible but
its just that Win7 is probably twice (if not more) as large as XP!

You can tell this by the DPC latency program. PowerSDR doesn't have any
major effect on DPCs other than expecting they are very low. That is a
factor of the operating system, the drivers of the hardware and the
motherboard. On my systems, the DPC ratings are the same pretty much 
whether
I run PowerSDR or not (it certainly doesn't substantially increase them).

I would look at what IRQ assignments are under the Win7 machine and see 
what
is sharing irqs especially with the firewire device. When you see the 
DPCLat
program go yellow or red, I think you usually have two high-bandwidth
devices fighting for the same interrupts.

It could be on your machine there is a Flex driver issue with the hardware
under Win7 but I can attest 7171 runs fine under Win7 (I just expect my
systems to have DPCs in the 20s instead of the 80-120s)!

73

Neal Campbell
Abroham Neal Software
www.abrohamnealsoftware.com
(540) 645 5394 NEW PHONE NUMBER

Amateur Radio: K3NC
Blog: http://www.abrohamnealsoftware.com/blog/
DXBase bug reports: email to ca...@dxbase.fogbugz.com
Abroham Neal forums: http:/www.abrohamnealsoftware.com/community/





On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 9:31 AM, Al Konschak <w...@konschak.org> wrote:

I received my Flex 3000 last May and been running it on Win XP and Vista 
32
on a laptop with no issues at all.

A few weeks ago I decided to upgrade the shack computer to Win 7 with a
clean install and new hard drive.

The computer is a Dell 420 with a Quad core Q9400 running 4 gigs of ram.
Surely enough horse power to run PSDR.



I did the upgrade and downloaded the latest drivers and Power SDR from 
the
Flex site. Everything worked right from the beginning, until I ran 
another
program with streaming media content, whether it be audio or video
concurrently with the flex.



The audio on the 3K would start to garble. If I restarted Power SDR, it
would clear for a few seconds then start to garble again. Everything 
would
run fine as long as I didn't multitask two streaming programs.



I did a little research and found out about DPC latency checker.  Every
time
I ran it with multiple streams, it ran off the chart in the red.



I made sure all my drivers were up to date from the dell site and also
played around with various buffering in the flex with no success.



Since I never had this problem with XP, I thought I'd roll back the Flex
driver to an earlier version. That didn't work at all with Win 7. Looks
like
you must have the latest driver for 7.



Since I kept my XP hard drive intact, I decided to put it back in the
machine.

I updated the Flex drivers on the XP drive to the latest (It was 2 
versions
back).



Everything is now working fine with XP and I can stream other programs
along
with the flex with very little latency.



It seems the latest Flex driver may have a problem with Win 7 on my
machine.
I wonder if  others are seeing the same?



Al Konschak

WI3Z



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