Setting up your laptop for Serato

Posted on Mar 25, 2008 | 6 comments

About a month ago, I wrote an article on how to organise your MP3s for DJing. It would seem from the amount that have read it, it was found to be pretty useful. I thought that maybe following it up with a number of other Serato tutorials would be a good idea… so here is the second; Setting up your (PC) laptop for use with Serato. Before I start this article, I want to make it clear that many of these ideas have been taking from existing forum posts, the SSL wiki, and other tips from people on the web. I am just trying to put everything together in one easy to read chunk to save you all the hassle I had finding out this information. With that in mind, I’d like to thank jaybird, and the many other people from whom I recycled and reorganised many of these tips.

This is written with my circumstances in mind, therefore it is a PC only guide (I don’t have a Mac), and specifically for Windows XP. I may transfer over to Vista at some point, and if I do, I will write a new piece about that. Also, while I try to explain everything as best I can – it also assumes you have some level of technical knowledge as far as computers are concerned. The more technical, the better, in fact.

Background

When I bought my Serato, I didn’t have the money to buy a brand new laptop as well. I assume that I am not the only person who found themselves in this position. Even though you could get a new laptop with good enough specs for about £400, it’s just money I didn’t have. So, I had to use an older laptop, and figure out a way to get the absolute best performance out of it so Serato would run without issue. This turned out to be pretty difficult as at first I had USB dropouts, poor performance, tunes stuttering and stammering as the CPU load went to 100% all the time… almost everything that could go wrong went wrong. If any of these things are happening to you when you are tying to use Serato – then this article could help.

First Steps

First thing is to make sure your laptop is as close to (if not better than) the minimum system requirements. These recommend that you have at least 1GB of memory, and a 1.5GHz processor, but I have managed to get Serato to run without a problem on 512MB of ram – albeit having to disable pretty much everything on the laptop and using it solely for Serato and nothing else. If you can get 1GB of memory though, I recommend it as an upgrade for a 512MB machine usually costs very little (£20 – £30).

The next thing I would do is make sue that the laptop is running Windows XP – it’s better than Vista performance wise at the moment for Serato. For a clean copy of Windows XP, follow these steps:

1. Format the Laptop, making sure you have all the latest drivers for the components in the laptop at the ready. Rather than use a driver CD that came with the laptop, if you are technical (and comfortable) enough, I would get all the latest drivers for each component from the relevant site. For example, I had to get motherboard (chip-set) drivers, sound drivers, graphics card drivers, and so on.
2. When the laptop is formatted, you should partition the drive, leaving 10GB for your operating system on the C drive, and setting up whatever you have left as a library backup / mix recording drive. On an 80GB drive this would mean 10GB for OS and the small packages that you would eventually install, and 70GB for your tracks.
3. Install a fresh copy of Windows XP on the C drive.
4. Install all the drivers, putting the chip-set drivers on first, then graphics, then sound, then… (delete as applicable).

Do not, under any circumstances, download any software at this point to put on the laptop, or install any other packages that came with the laptop on CD. We simply don’t need them. The only thing that should be on the PC at this stage is our nice fresh copy of Windows XP… at this point we do not need any virus packages, or broadband helpers, or printer software – leave the fresh install as is.

Optimising Windows

Now we have this install of XP – it’s time to optimise it. There are many ways to do this, and many things you may or may not need to take out/clean/optimise. Basically rather than split it up here into what is absolutely necessary and what isn’t, I am going to give you a whole list of tips to follow. You can run through these in half an hour and have that clean copy of windows running even faster. In most instances, you don’t need to do a lot to Windows XP to get Serato running at its most efficient.

1. Visual Performance – right click computer (on the desktop), select properties. Select the “Advanced” tab. Click the “settings” button (under performance). Select the radio button that says “Adjust for best performance”. Click “Apply”.
2. Background Services – right click computer (on the desktop), select properties. Select the “Advanced tab”. Click the “settings” button (under performance). Select the Advanced tab. Select the radio button that says “Background Services”. Click “Apply”.
3. Disable error reporting – right click computer (on the desktop), select properties. Select the “Advanced” tab. Click the “Error Reporting” button at the bottom of the screen. Click the “disable error reporting” radio button. Click “OK”.
4. Disable Remote Desktop – right click computer (on the desktop), select properties. Select the “Remote” tab. Make sure both the boxes on this page are unchecked.
5. Disable Automatic Updates – right click computer (on the desktop), select properties. Select the “Remote” tab. Click “Turn off Automatic updates”. Click “Apply”.
6. Turn off system restore – right click computer (on the desktop), select properties. Select the “System Restore” tab. Make sure the “Turn off system restore” box is checked. Click “Apply”.
7. Remove unneeded components – Open up the “add/Remove Programs” box from the control panel. Click “Add/Remove Windows Components” in the left hand gutter. Many of the items that pop up, you will not need. Look through them and uncheck any you do not want installed, then click OK. A tip here is I don’t have any of them installed and it doesn’t effect what I can or cannot do.
8. Turn off system sounds – Open up the “Sounds and Audio Devices” box from the control panel, and click on “Sounds”. From the drop down list, click “No Sounds”, then click “No” then click “Apply”.
9. Turn off screensaver – Right click the mouse on the desktop, select “properties”. Click “Screensaver”. In the drop down list choose “none”. Click “Apply”.
10. Remove desktop image – Right click the mouse on the desktop, select “properties”. Click “Desktop”. In the “Background” box, click “NONE”. Click “Apply”.
11. Remove Drive Indexing – Open up windows explorer, and right click on your C drive and go down to properties. Uncheck the box that says “Allow Indexing Service to index this disk for fast file searching”. Click “Apply”. repeat this for all the drives on your PC.
12. Disable Fast User Switching – Open up the “User Accounts” from the control panel. Click “Change the way users log on or off”. Untick Use Fast User Switching. Click “Apply”.
13. Switch Off Power Schemes – Start > Settings > Control Panel > Power Options > Always On > Turn off monitor and turn off hard discs to Never
14. Switch Off Hibernation – Start > Settings > Control Panel > Power Options > Hibernate > Untick Hibernation
15. Startup and Recovery Options – Right click My Computer and click on Properties > Advanced > Start Up & Recovery Settings and uncheck “Automatically Restart”. Fixed Swap File (Virtual Memory) – Select the Advanced tab of the Systems applet and then select the Performance settings button. Then select the Advanced page. In here it is possible to customise the Virtual Memory. For custom size, this is often recommended to be 1.5 to 2 times the amount of your total RAM for both initial and maximum size. Set this to a fixed minimum and maximum value according to your existing RAM.
16. Disable Offline Files – Start > Settings > Control Panel > Folder Options > Offline Files > Untick “Enable Offline Files”
17. Disable Automatic Desktop Cleanup Wizard – Start > Settings > Control Panel > Display > Desktop > Customise Desktop > Untick “Run Desktop Cleanup Wizard every 60 days”

Some of these tips I already knew – some I found on this excellent article that has 25 tips on how to optimise your PC for sound, and other general stuff I picked up in this very good Windows XP Optimization Guide. This is now about the best system we can get, so let’s continue.

Installing Serato

The driver CD that came with your Serato box will more than likely be out of date. The current version of software that is available at the time of writing this article is Scratch LIVE 1.8.0 which you can download here. You can also download the latest update of the manual from this page. This version has the most features of any Serato release so far, and I have been using it without a single problem now for a number of months, so this is the version I am going to recommend that you install.

1. Connect your laptop to the Serato box via the included USB cable.
2. The laptop will now ask you for drivers for the Serato system. You can find these drivers in latest version of Serato that you just downloaded, inside the Drivers > XP > SL1 directory (they are called SeratoUsb.sys and SeratoUsb.inf). Select this directory and continue through until the drivers have been fully installed.
3. The Serato will now be installed for use on your system, however, due to some weird technical issue that is way beyond me, it will only install the Serato drivers for the USB port you had it attached in at that moment. In order for Serato to work on any USB port on your laptop, I suggest that you follow steps 1 and 2 for each port, and then check that it does indeed work as it should no matter where you have plugged it in.
4. You must now install the Scratch Live software. Simply double click the setup.exe that came in the 1.8.0 download, and this will install the software to a location of your choosing. I recommend that this be the C drive, the same as the operating system.
5. When installed, click the Scratch Live icon on the desktop, and the software should load without problem. As long as you have your Serato box still plugged in via USB, you should be able to see the standard Scratch Live view displaying the visual representation of two turntables.

And that’s it. A nice fresh install of optimised Windows XP, with the latest version of Scratch Tools and the drivers installed on all ports. You should really be ready to take on the world.

Serato Configuration

I’m not going to talk too much about Serato configuration, the Serato manual does a good job of that. There are, however, two really important options that you can enable/disable depending on the resources on your machine. If you setup everything as the above article suggests, and you are still experiencing USB dropouts – you need to go into your settings and make sure that the “Auto Build Overviews” and also the “Hi-Fi Sampler” settings are both unchecked. They really can make a big difference to the performance of the laptop. You should also read the aforementioned Serato manual from cover to cover, at least 10 times, because I find something new every time I do.

Disclaimer

I’ve never had to add anything like this to an article I have crafted – but as I stated at the very beginning, I am assuming you have some technical knowledge before you dive in and do any of this. You can post me your laptop to fix if you break it, with a letter complaining that it was all my fault – but expect to see both items for sale on ebay within a few days. In other words – if you are unsure, don’t do it, because it’s just too difficult to troubleshoot.