I figured this topic should go in the "Tips" category.
If you're like me you really stress over getting the most out of your RAM that you possibly can (I just need to load one more instrument!). Although normally gamers tweak their system for RAM optimation, we musicians can do the same for audio. At www.blackviper.com there are instructions for us PC users on how to do this safely (and safe is the key word!).
I hope this helps someone out there. Talk to everyone later!
Wow thanks - I just went up and took a quick look. Quite informative I will make sure to return.Originally Posted by FossMan
Yes, thank you for sharing that. Here is an article from Sound on Sound which talks about some tweaks specifically helpful for music production.
www.EricHermanMusic.com
- Cool Tunes for Kids -
Tweak XP
The two most important is getting rid of the whiz/bang/flash menus of XP and going for the stripped down Windows 95 look, get rid of your desktop backgrounds too BTW. Also another one that always helps is stopping those services from starting up when you boot your computer. Also, anyone out there who is running an Anti-Virus software, it may help to create another hardware profile with the Anti-Virus disabled that you can load when you are seriously churning out the tunes and that turns off access to the computer modem and internet, and one for general usage that allows your computer to be protected when the wife and kids are on it.
Whatever... I'm such an idiot
Note: ACPI is known to cause problems with some setups, but I think this is getting to be a more and more rare thing. I would advise anyone to think before disabling it as in every case I've tried to do it, it's done more harm than good. Some computer hardware acts adversely to this being disabled (for example CDRW and DVDRW drives act funny or will not show up at all.) This would be a LAST resort for me.
What! How the heck to you do that now? Interesting schtuff.And NO you are not an idiot!!!
At the risk of been a bit boring,
I can't recommend enough having two partitions with two separate Operating systems. Can be a pair of XPs, one of them fully tweaked for music aplications, and the other charged with your Firewall, antivirus, network connections, your desktop applications, some mpeg videos of your kids, the fishtank screensaver, etc...
This can be really effective in keeping your Audio Workstation stable.
That's why I mentioned setting up a seperate hardware profile. This is sort of the same thing without bogging down your system with another partition and OS install. OS installs use a lot of hard drive space. There are limits to what you can do with a seperate hardware profile, but it is another way of doing it.
Yes, it eats a lot more of your HDD space, and may be more complicated to install the first time. But you will have two different windows registers. We all know how easely the register can be damaged, or filled up with sh**t (Oops, did I say that?) that slows down performance. You don't need to have resident protective software like antivirus. And if you are aware of keeping your network devices disabled, then your DAW is unlikely to get corrupted by worms, spyware, and other malitious software. And it is also more unlikely you run in software incompatibilities with unexpected crashes, for example TV applications - audio applications.
I find hardware profiles useful for, well, exactly that: to manage different hardware configurations for one equipment. But experience prevents me from mixing audio applications with general purpose software and multimedia.
I think It's worth having a couple of 80 GB HDDs, for example. One entirely for data, and another with, may be 3 partitions: 20GB (DAW XP) / 20GB(General Purpose XP) / 40GB (Data). BTW, I don't think HDD space is a concern anymore, is it? Well, I'm not recording multitrack audio, so may be your HDD needs are more demanding.
Anton
I concur and admit that it is more beneficial for everyone to have more than one partition (that way you can customize out the wazoo.) However, XP is limited in that you can't unallocate hard drive space and therefor, when its done its done. You can't go back and partition a hard drive in XP without starting over from scratch unless you want to invest in PartitionMagic or some other hard drive management software. Unfortunately, there's no cheap/easy way around this as of yet. Maybe Longhorn will change this, but I'll say that if anything happens and you have to reinstall XP, then that is the time to really think about a dual boot setup with two hard drive partitions. Interesting conversation at any rate.
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