The hardest thing in doing laptop based music is the hic cups that come along the way. I’ve had a small one happen each show and it’s the tracks cutting in and out which sometimes results in a sudden BSO. It’s unnerving and makes you blame PC’s. I was talking to nick from the band 26 and he uses a mac and was having similar problems with streaming audio. So there went my PC theroy. I ask him how he fixed it and he said no one believed him but he speculated it was the vibrations from the foldback and the frount of house speakers. He went about purchasing audio dampeners for his laptop and a case that had extra foam in it and he hasn’t had the problem ever since.
 
I must say, this is very promising and makes sense since a HD has an arm that reads the data in and ‘duh’ couldn’t that just jump about if the vibrations were strong enough. I then searched around a bit and found articles relating to that as an issue and then this one …
 
Q. My wife thinks the construction going on next door(building a house) can ruin her hard drive. She had to put a new harddrive in last week and blames the construction next door. Is thispossible?

A. Actually, it is possible your wife is correct.If the construction is causing a lot of vibration because of heavyequipment, large trucks, pounding hammers and so forth, this could bedamaging the hard drive if she is using the computer while this isgoing on.

A friend of mine once related to me a story of how his hard drive on his laptop was destroyed by riding on a train.

It turns out that that the steady vibration of the train caused therocker arm of the hard drive to make pock marks all over the internaldisk platter of the hard drive which ultimately resulted in drivefailure.

Imagine a needle on a record player bouncing around if you weretrying to drive across town and play an LP at the same time. Or ifyou’re of a certain age think back to a time that you might have dancedto a great song only to have the record skip as a result of you feethitting the floor too hard.

Same thing applies to standard hard drives so it’s entirely possible that the construction nearby has caused the problem.
I can hear the kids now. Record player? Skip? What’s that old man talking about?
 
Then I think, wow, that might be killing the platter on the HD too. So now I have 2 options one is to invest in some Dampening material and the other is to get an SSD drive … can’t wait to try either, skipping be gone!!
 
On another note, anyone a wordpress poet? Don’t know what I’m talking about? then that question is not for you
 
Take care,
 

Tags: 26, Laptop