PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

I guess I went a little wild on the belly dance project and it's maxed out my Thinkpad w520's 8GB ram. The cpu's holding up, being able to play back with 512 sample latency. And the sad thing is, I already have a new laptop (with 16gb ram and faster i7 cpu) on standby, but don't have anything set up on it. Setting up Live is ok, but I don't want to deal with authorizing all the plugins again at this point in time. So for the time being, I'm thinking of upgrading RAM on the Thinkpad, at least finish off the current project. Not a costly thing to do, but still, it kills me inside to have to upgrade something I know I'm going to put away.

Thinkpad w520 was somewhat of a disappointment... Everything about it was great, except for the power plug and the connector on the laptop side. It was having problems detecting it was plugged in less than a year after purchase, and I couldn't ship it off to get it fixed since I needed to use it every day. I mean, think about that.. the "built like a tank" brand shipping with faulty power connections. That's about as weak as you can get. I've had to do recording sessions off battery, even though it was plugged in, because the laptop couldn't detect it was plugged in. Though it eventually detected power, imagine how it would have been if the batteries just ran out... and I've got a VO talent I'm paying for, and my creative director in the studio I've booked for another 4 hours. That is what nightmares are made of.
That was precisely when I decided to move away from Thinkpads permanently. So sad.

it can't be that tough to fix.
it probably only needs a small screwdriver, MAYBE a soldering iron, but probably just the screwdriver.

Ken -- I had the SAME issue with my w520 and the power plug. I finally used a pick (like for dental work) to pull the brass tabs inside the power connector toward the center of the plug, in essence restoring the "spring" to them (I always found if I did some connector yoga and contorted the plug at various angles, power would be detected. from this I assumed the tabs in the connector on the laptop side came from the factory without enough spring in them, and had bent a little too much and eventually loose contact.) This WORKED, and I haven't had any issues since performing this procedure.

Second...adding more RAM, there are 4 bays total, 2 under the keyboard, and two accessible from the bottom. You can add 2x4GB without removing the sticks you have (so you don't need to buy 2x8GB). I did this using some Mushkin memory for fairly cheap. (I also added an mSATA 128GB SSD that supports my OS, and allows me to keep the HDD and DVD without removing anything).

Also - The CPU is limited to about 800MHz on battery alone, vs. 2.2GHz with plugged in power. I can't run SCOPE at minimum latencies with battery only). I've also disabled the Intel display, so only nvidia with external VRAM is used, and that helps bring down latencies also.

thnx for the tip about the power plug. I'll see if I can find the contact points to fiddle with.

And for ram, I'm going to check which slots are actually used. I haven't opened up the ram slots yet, but so far I'm reading that the quad cores use up all 4 slots... so worst case, I'll have to do a 4gb x 4 to get 16gb. Which still isn't that bad in the grand scheme of things.

If I can get the power and RAM set up right, I'd have 2 fully functioning powerful machines. I'd be pretty happy with that.

Oh man, this sucks. I got the ram so I'm up to 16gb ram, but I forgot about the 32bit 4gb addressable ram limit. So I'm really at the limit of the max amount of ram my 32bit Live can use.. ever. I never made a big deal out of the 32bit/64bit thing but man, when you're up against the wall, it really sucks because there's literally no where to run. Maybe I have to do the 64bit with 32bit adapter route, but that's an overhaul I don't want to do mid production.

This really, really sucks. I can play the project if I disable a Kontakt instance.. (it gives an "out of memory" error if I try to freeze it) so maybe I'll just bounce that back in later.

My conclusion is that with RAM so cheap these days, and 16gb, 32gb being very common, 64bit is definitely a must if you're building a daw from ground up. So much for not paying attention to these things... Haven't really been messing with my set up the past few years. If you're between projects and still running 32bit.. UPGRADE. NOW. Granted, not all projects will hit the 4gb limit, but when you do, it'll be a big project, and you probably don't want it to fail on you.

Aha! jBridge adapter! jBridge is a 32bit to 64bit host adapter, but can also do 32bit to 32bit host. Essentially gives each plugin instance 4gb ram. Problem solved!

did I just make an obvious discovery?