Which OS for Dedicated GS PC

[Anders00]

Ok so I managed to buy a PIII 800 off of a friend for about 120$ so I can expand my GS rig a bit.

I\'m planning on doing MIDIOverLan and putting an audiophile 2496 in the new machine, going S/PDIF into the Delta 66 on my main machine (pentium IV 1.7, WinXP).

My question is: which OS should I use in the dedicated GS PC? Obviously I just want stability and the best possible performance from the PIII.


Also, any other advice would be much appreciated.
Thanks!
-Matt

[Scott Cairns]

Windows 98 has a smaller footprint than 2000 or XP but for stability you can\'t go past 2000/XP IMO.

Just a thought, if you do install XP on your PIII, turn off all the \"eye candy\". My second DAW is a PIII (actually it also has a 2496 and MOL!) and it runs much smoother without the fancy graphics.

Cheers, Scott.

[Haydn]

Just went back to Win 98 on my P3 733 machine. Was getting just as many crashes from Giga in XP and loading times were considerably longer in XP. On the average of 3-4 times longer. Plus Win 98 loads about 50% more samples.

[Alexcremers]

Giga and Win 98 go a long way back. It\'s still a perfect marriage. I\'m sticking to it untill Giga 3.0 tells me otherwise.


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Alex Cremers

[Anders00]

The reason I\'m getting the second DAW, besides extra polyphony, is the crashing that I get on my main machine with XP. So if 98 at least isn\'t any WORSE for stability, i guess i\'m hearing that I should go that route for the PIII machine.

Thanks for all the advice guys,
-Matt

[Scott Cairns]

Hehehe. I guess that\'s where Giga is somewhat unusual as it runs in kernel mode. For once an app seems to run better in ye olde 98.

Doing web design and development work in 98 was pure hell. I was glad to see the back of it.

Personally, I have NEVER had a crash with Giga across two machines. The only exception being when I tried to use the s-converter transferring SOV. But not in playback or recording.

But hey, if you guys are successfully running Giga under 98, and with 98 having a lot less overhead, I say go for it.

Scott.

[Simon Ravn]

I use Win98SE on 3 GS machines and they never crash.

[His Frogness]

I ran Cubase on 98 since 98 came out. Hardly ever had a problem. Then I switched to 2k and, still to this day on my old P3 800, there\'s little clicks and pops that relate to the video card, which is a GForce2. That shouldn\'t happen with a GForce2, it\'s a pretty damn good video card and ran on the same 400 that never had any clicks or pops. Now I\'m on a P4 2.8GHz and have run into enough problems that I\'m thinking of rolling back to 98. I just never had the kinds of stupid little annoying problems that I get in 2k, like random samplerate changes in Sound Forge or all my 2408 settings resetting themselves to default every time I shut the computer down. The only thing I like about 2k is that you can access your control panel while your app is is still running.

From what I understand, 2k is a total about hardware and will not allow any piece of software to directly communicate with any piece of hardware, whereas 98 does, making 98 more efficient for audio. That\'s just what I heard, but it was from an IT whiz.