Here's a list of things that I've tried with the Firewire 410.

My goal is to have a mobile setup that I can gig quickly, e.g. even in the space of an 2 song open mic. Which means a mic, controller of some sort (e.g. foot pedal board) and a laptop plus whatever connections

I have found the firewire 410 frustrating. I've had two laptops and one desktop. All have been relatively finicky.

A Sager 3ghz laptop, 1GB ram, 128MB video ram 60GB 7200 rpm drive, with a firewire port (TI chipset), which should have worked.

A Motion Computing M1400 Tablet PC 1GB ram 60GB 5400 rpm drive with a

I figured on there being some technical issues, as firewire audio is kinda new, the device complex.

First I just wanted them to play Audio CD's. ( here the latency wor) this turns out to be a nasty bug with Windows, where DMA mode would get locked into something very non-optimal The issues here sounded like the

Then DVD's - this tends to be more complex. The sound card would just drop out.

Then something from Ableton Live or other suitable looping song

Sager

issues were the audio card would just disconnect at random times for no descernable reasons. Then some causes started to come out, connecting anything to the back of th jacks, e.g. speaker cables, midi jacks.

Midi jacks would make it restart

the firewire connect jiggles would cause it to disconnect.

This appeared to be mostly electrical.

M1400

Here in addition to all the above I had to create

the tablet had less software on it, and was a fresher install of windows.

I ended up having to get a separate cardbus firewire card, which requires that i use the 4pin adapter as it didn't come with a power (the 6 pin ends up not working),

it with the shared memory driver (which can't really be disabled) is on IRQ10, everything else is pretty much on IRQ11. It took some futzying with enabling and disabling devices to get it to that state.

The Firewire 410 is incredibly sensitive to electrical noise

This is true both on if it's getting powered by the wall plug, or if the device powering it is. SURGE PROTECTION IS NOT ENOUGH. you MUST have the laptop using the Firewire 410 and the Firewire 410 (and aparently anything else connected to the laptop electrically e.g. network hubs,( but not the other devices path the hub/switch) on battery backup.

I ran a test, I have a desktop pc that anytime plugging into the electrical circuit cause the Firewire410 to disconnect (if playing a stream), which provided a convenient way to test various combinations out. The tablet PC has it's own internal power.

this case also solved the speaker and midi plugin problems. However I have had it disconnect when I unplug USB devices (mouse ) occasionally.

When something fails:

• The application using the audio card or midi,
• WinDVD requires stopping the movie and hitting play again
• Winamp requires exiting and reentering for the driver to work properly. e
• Ableton Live 5.0.01 requires you reselect the audio in preferences, however this will not resolve the midi (if your using it)

When the midi cuts out (even if the audio is still working)

• the application referencing the driver usually will lock up,
• MidiTranslator - requires end task, and restart, it too requires exiting and restarting the app.