Hello, I am thinking about purchasing a Dell Inspiron Notebook with an Intel Core Duo 2.4 ghz processor, 3 gigs of ram, 120 gig hard drive, and a Sound Blaster X-Fi Extreme Audio for notebooks sound card.  Will this be sufficient to run VDL2 and Sibelius 4 with few to no drop-outs in sound?  If not, any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks!

JCA

Welcome to the forum.

Look at my signature below and compare what I am running to what you are considering buying. I would say that what you are looking at would be a good enough system to use. Make sure to use ASIO with whatever sound card you choose.

Oh, and you might want to go ahead and upgrade to [b]VDL 2.5[/b] and [b]Sibelius 5.1[/b] while you're at it.

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Late
Hugh

One more thing

If it wasn't for some Windows-only software I have to run on my laptop, I would probably have a Mac. Something else to consider.

Thanks, Hugh.�� This is probably a dumb question, but how do I determine if this sound card that I am looking at is ASIO compatable?�� Thanks!

If you check the specs of your soundcard, it should tell you whether or not it's ASIO compatible. Or if you already have VDL2 installed, just go to the ";soundcard"; setup window in VDL, and if you have ";ASIO"; listed as an option in the ";interface"; menu, that's a good sign. Many times, Windows PC's only ship with MME or DirectSound drivers, which don't perform nearly as well as ASIO.

Here's a FAQ that may be helpful:
https://www.tapspace.com/support/faq/index.php?action=artikel&cat=4&id=33&artlang=en

X-Fi I'm 99% sure does ASIO out of the box.  If not, there's certainly a way to do it.

That said, Dell is sneaky in this regard.  Make sure you're getting the sound card, and not the cheap on-board with ";X-Fi software"; with which to run it...