By USB keys I mean like a portable "thumb drive". I stopped using those but the problems are still here.

I reviewed my laptops power saving settings. It was set to kill the hard drive after 10m and USB "selective suspending" were both enabled. I don't know if that would effect anything so I will see and write back.

I also went into device manager and had windows search for updates for all my serial bus devices. It said I have the latest & greatest drivers.

I've also disabled "windows aero" in my windows vista (the CPU hog). I also realized I have a program "tortoise svn" and one of it's setting "icon overlays" using an indexing process that runs in the background. I've disabled the icon overlays on that thing and I went thru 'msconfig' and disabled services I don't need.

I also set it to give the 'services' the CPU priority. I just now also lowered the USB buffer from '10' to '2'. I hope that between all of these changes it starts working. I will update you after I am sure if it fixed it or not.

Happening at every USB setting from 2 - 10 so far. I am trying 20 next.

Hello, have you tried the steps listed here?

www.serato.com

If so did you try the diag tool here:
www.serato.com

These should help us get a clear picture of what to help you tackle here it seems to be a IRQ issue or a Bios being out of date.

I have taken all reasonable steps to disable processes that could interrupt. The only steps I did not follow were that asked me to disable the security software I use to protect myself from computer viruses. Here is your trace.

THanks.

FYI I use AVG free version. It scans only 1x per week while I sleep, and this issue happens every day, multiple times.

Also I tried all USB timeout settings. (finally happened at 20).

My characterization is that at the lower settings it drops out more frequently for shorter periods. At higher settings it drops out more rarely but when it does songs randomly paused, or all the "hot cue buttons" dont light up like the "current state" of the controller is as if I had just turned it on.

Don't know if any of this info is helpful.

Any update guys? I'm hoping we can make some progress today if possible.

Hello reviewing your trace, it seems that the built in sound-card, wireless and ether-net cards are causing delay I would recommend disabling them while gigging.
It also seems to suggest your video card drivers may be out of date.

I would recommend also to see if your computer maker has resolved some of these issues already downloading the latest bios and usb chipset drivers for your system.

All my drivers are up to date. I disabled the built in sound, wireless, and ethernet. The problem is still happening. I also disabled anti-virus. It still happens at all USB latency settings. Please advise.

I was in the device manager and right clicked the Ns7 and clicked update driver. It said it found updates. Windows restarted and when it came back up asked me to insert the numark disk. I did and then I got a message that the drivers could not be installed. Now I can't use my NS7 at all. It won't appear in the device manager and re-plugging it back in just makes Windows give me another error.

Now I can't play with the mixer at all. Its worse. Please give me detailed & timely steps how I can resolve my issues. Thank you.

Glad you were so helpful (sarcasm). You didn't help one bit but the community resolve it weeks ago. I was waiting to see if you guys even cared enough to follow up. Apparently you did not.

Hello glad the issue was resolved. Sorry for the delay some times topics get missed. We are always available for an instant response on the phone as well.

The issue has returned suddenly after no changes have been made. Experimenting with Windows Performance Analyzer (xperf) and DPC latency monitor, and device manager I have narrowed down the variable.

Scenario A
When I remove the battery and disconnect all USB plugs, spikes hit green, sometimes yellow, and rarely red, !!EXACTLY!! every 15 seconds.

Scenario B
When I plug in the Ns7 to a USB port, it spikes yellow/red every 1-3 seconds, with or without ITCH running, at every latency setting within ITCH. Disabling the NS7 in the device manager or unplugging both immediately returns me to scenario A

I have just attached screenshots, and raw traces from the Windows Performance Tool which shows a couple interesting services as consuming the majority of DPC. Xperf doesn't really show any differences with or without the NS7 attached, so I ran this report with it attached, in case it provides additional information this way.

Now it seems the issue lies with a conflict between some system service/driver/hardware and the NS7 driver. Is there any way to ascertain if the problem is on the NS7's end? I tried disabling basically everything but mouse & keyboard, and the NS7, and the issue still occurs, I tried at every USB port, the issue still happens (and only with ns7 connected & enabled), this is on Windows 7.

Is there any way to give me specif advice to resolve this issue in a timely manner? On my PC I guess this issue does not happen, drop outs still occur but 100s of times more brief & rare on that other machine.

From the information & reports, can you confirm/deny if this problem could possibly be fixed without buying a laptop and the likely-hood? Please make a recommendation, or recommendations (new laptop, or software tweaks to existing laptop).

Laptop & Desktop are both Athlon.

Also, ITCH.exe is using 50% just to sit there idle, with no controller plugged in. What gives?

And I'll re-iterate that this problem suddenly just started to show up. I never installed any software, machine has been completely dedicated to DJing, no changes at all were made between when it last didn't have this issue, and when it first did.

No info is in the status bar in ITCH when its idling at 50% cpu, its not analyzing files, writing tags, or anything. Its just doing nothing but consuming cpu.

Removing the battery knocked ~50% off the spikes that occur exactly every 15 seconds.
Introducing the NS7 causes new spikes every 1-2 seconds.

It sounds like you have had a driver or windows update for a component in your computer which perhaps has degraded your USB performance its possible that the component shares the same bus as the USB chipset or has introduced an IRQ conflict.

I would recommend following the usual diagnosis steps of disabling network, built in audio and wifi to see which device is causing the trouble.

I installed a bios upgrade. www.csd.toshiba.com

After this my Windows would no longer boot. I am re-installing Windows in hopes that my computer can now boot, so that I can measure the DPC latency after the BIOS flash.

From the bios update's changelog "Fixed: MPEG/Audio stutters or skips when turning the WLAN switch off."

Hmm I did have that switch off when these issues were occurring. Still installing Win 7.

I was monitoring DPC latency while ITCH was installing, the issue still occurs after the BIOS update. As soon as ITCH finishes installing the drivers, the DPC latency spikes start occurring way more frequently.

After I open ITCH and start playing things are noticeably smoother, I couldn't replicate any drop outs after upgrading the BIOS so far, I'll keep you posted.

Still getting drop outs when loading songs after my hard drive has spun down. Can you recommend a way to stop? I tried disabling selective spin down, no cigar.

I press 'load' and the display freezes, if the hard drive is spinning up. Sometimes it even causes audio drop outs and the 'midi' indicator on ITCH illuminates red while the song loads, for a split second. All audio can drop out sometimes. It only happens when I leave the computer idle for 5-10 minutes, and then try to go load a song.

Good to hear it seems your computer is behaving better after the update based on the change log it sounds like an IRQ issue was the cause.

Is this the internal or external drive? Sorry thats not really something we can control.
You might need to take that up with your drive vendor.

Its an external drive. Couldn't you just write 1kb to a temp file every minute, to keep the drive from spinning down?

I could control it with a simple PHP script

<?php
$h=fopen('temp','w');
while(true) {
fwrite($h, rand(1,10));
sleep(30);
}
?>

Just have an option to write a random # 1-10 to a file, every 30 seconds. It would keep the drive from spinning down.

Because im a nice guy I did some research for you and think this aught to do the trick :-)
nosleephd.codeplex.com

Thanks. I suggest that Serato would add this as a built in feature, it would be easy to implement presumably, and would significantly reduce the # of users who come on the support forms asking for help with drop outs.