I have a peculiar problem and I'm not sure how to isolate where the weak link is. I'm hoping that someone else out there has experience or is experiencing a similar problem so we can find a solution together.


I have a brand new laptop and have been editing with an external ADS Dual Link Firewire Drive (has the oxford 911 chipset). Everything has been great but when I try to Print-to-tape I experience audio dropouts on the tape from the very beginning. The dropouts don't show up when I playback from the timeline during editing - only when I PTT. This was only the 2nd project that I exported from the laptop and had no difficulties with the first (but I used a Western Digital external drive on the 1st one).


I tried everything I could think of to get it to work...and then it magically worked on the last time I said I was going to try it. There was no explanation for why it didn't drop audio the last time I exported (that I can think of) b/c I didn't change anything. I've since tried to export several more times and cannot overcome the audio dropout problem.


However, if I take the ADS firewire drive to a different computer it will PTT fine w/o any audio dropout. The only thing I haven't tried that I can think of is to use a firewire card in the available cardbus slot to see if that works.


The specs on the laptop are:


3.06 HT enabled Processor

1 GIG DDR 333 RAM

60 gig system drive

200 gig external firewire drive mounted in ADS case

I think the motherboard is based on the SiS645DX Chipset


So, if anyone has any ideas on why I would get audio dropout, PLEEEASE let me know. It was very disturbing to run into this problem on only the 2nd project I've worked on with the new machine.


Thanks,


Mike