I have Pro Tools for Windows XP on a new Pentium 4 PC and after tweaking my system, I still get “The Operating System held off Interrupts for too long: Increase the hardware buffer size” errors consistently. What’s wrong? How do I find my motherboard chipset?
You’ll need to check the brand of chipset your computer has. You can go into Device Manager and open System Devices, and look for your CPU-to-AGP or CPU-to-PCI bridge. The brand name of this device (Intel, AMD, VIA, SIS, ALI, or nVIDEA, ATI) will tell you what type of motherboard you have.
If you have Intel chipset, you will likely have several Intel 82801 devices. For this purpose, these are meaningless, there will be another one that is 82xxx where the xxx is 865, 875, 915, 925, or several others. It will likely have several letters after it. This is the actual model number of the chipset on your motherboard. For example, Intel 82875PE means Intel 875 PE chipset, Intel 82915XE means 915 XE chipset.
As of March 1, 2005, you’ll need to check this compatibility list for Intel chipsets:
Incompatible: (*see below)
Intel 915G
Intel 915P
Intel 925X
Compatible:
Intel 925XE
Intel 845 (all varieties)
Intel 865 (all varieties)
Intel 875 (all varieties)
Not Tested (therefore not recommended currently):
Intel 915GL
Intel 915GV
* If you have a chipset listed as incompatible, there is a likely solution to this problem, Digidesign reports high success rates with this.
The solution is to purchase a USB powered hub and plug only the MBox into it and then into your computer. The hub MUST be a POWERED hub (which has a wall-wort power supply) AND be running in POWERED mode, not just drawing power off the computer’s USB port.
Also, a side note, since the MBox does not need or require the high-speed USB 2.0, it does not matter if the USB hub is normal speed USB 1.1 or high-speed USB 2.0, either will work fine. But, since the price difference of getting the 2.0 is very small, if you might want 2.0 in the future for any other uses, it might be a good idea to go with the high-speed 2.0 hub.
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