Trouble with Cube4LE with CPU usage? USBus?

[Matrolen]

I just purchased the Lexicon Alpha USB interfase for live gigs with laptop and on the road recording, installed the drivers, the software and Cubase 4LE smoothly. I am running on an Athlon 64x2 based HP Pavilion laptop with 2g Ram on Windows XP Pro. Hardware on the Alpha seems to work fine because I can Dicrectly monitor all the ins and the outs work fine. The problem arises when I run Cubase and open an audio channel and try to monitor the Playback, not even during recording, just monitoring the channel on the highest CPU setting on the alpha Asio Control Panel to decrease latency. During monitoring, the sound starts off nicely but after a few seconds and at different intervals the sound distorts awfully for short periods of time. At first, as the slider mentions i thought it was my CPU spiking with too much workload, but I monitored the CPU usage and it never goes up more than 8% during this process.

If I lower CPU usage this sound distortion goes away but I get latencies I cannot work with because I intend to play live with my laptop. I read in some forums that maybe the USB bus on my laptop cannot handle the info transfers. i have already tried disconnecting all USB devices and using all the ports with the interfase and get the same results. I have also tried closing all applications and reducing all background CPU usage to no avail. Also, I cannot choose a setting a bit less than the highest setting, playback simply will not happen. I have to set it to about 4 levels away from the highest setting, which gives me unforgivable latency.

Help. Please?

[Electriclight]

There are newer drivers released on Lexiconpro.com a few months ago. You might try those. However I'm not sure you will ever get the latency you are looking for. Are you monitoring CPU in Windows or in Cubase? (Hit F12)

Also, be aware that common laptop hard drives are 5400 rpm which are not always capable of keeping up. Then of course there are the Windows optimizing tweaks...primarily setting processor priority to background services.