In an update to all the other updates about my new OmniStudio USB and it’s drivers, I have to say that even though I felt I had extensive “proof” that the M-Audio drivers tore apart my system, in fact I now revise my findings to say they revealed the age of my system and problems not seen before. Whatever it interacted (conspired ?) with to ruin my New Year is as gone as 2003.

I did a complete and total overhaul of my XP installation (including hardware changes) so it is impossible to guage what piece of registry or hardware trash went berserk when I installed the M-Audio drivers.

I had to flash BIOS, reformat the system drive, re-install XP Pro, get SP1 and every patch, get DirectX 9.1, etc. etc. I had to roll back a memory upgrade originally up from 512mg to 1G back down to 768mg because (as far as I can) the two year old motherboard/power supply could not handle the voltage drain. In addition all the USB components I had plugged in needed to be giggled about in order to back off the IRQ train. (I have to say this part was especially disapointing. I remember the days when we unwrapped our new audio cards and immediately had to start flipping board jumpers both on the motherboard as well as the new card itself in order to keep a balance in IRQ resources. I thought mankind had solved this issue(!) Did USB break PnP?)

I have now been up and running 72 hours without a crash, I’m mixing in FL Studio, using Waves plugins, mastering in Sony Sound Forge, etc. etc. no problems with anything. I’ve been very cautious but making sure I tax the system at every step. So far so good.