KVR Audio

Nistegmos · Post by **Nistegmos** » Mon Jul 07, 2014 9:46 pm

I was happy with XP SP2. After I got hornswaggled into installing SP3, everything was slower for some reason. Anyways, then I got a new computer and it came with Vista and of course sucked badly, but I tried to make it work as good as XP SP2. I tried for a whole year, trying every tweak and optimization I could find and invented some of my own. Anyways, I gave up after that year. And the funny thing is, GateWay claimed that my computer wouldn't support a downgrade to XP, and they wouldn't provide any hardware drivers or softwares for XP, only Vista. But I downgraded to XP and everything worked anyways! So they were lying!

Well, I had a tragic loss, and I lost that computer and also the old one. But in recent years I got a new computer again. This time only Windows 7 was available. I noticed some improvements, and also some annoying new bugs. After less than a year of use, Windows 7 corrupted itself into not booting. Even wierder was that it wouldn't even boot the recovery CD-ROM. I think something wierd was happening to the MBR and boot areas and the BIOS also. I noticed that every time the computer runs, the BIOS makes note of the MBR's corresponding OS. It's a theory anyhow.

Every time I ran Linux LiveCD's I had no problems whatsoever. But I just couldn't get the Windows 7 CD-ROM to boot up so I could re-install or recover. So I got really upset and threw away the CD-ROM and booted into Linux and intentionally killed off the Windows folder.

After that, I messed around with the partitions and installed Linux and copied over my old files onto the Linux partitions. This was a really good move, because I eventually learned how to run Windows programs on Linux using Wine.

At first I had the wrong distros of Linux for running audio programs, but I finally got Ubuntu Studio v14.04 LTS (Long Time Support) running and it comes with Wine included so I was able to install Reaper and a bunch of other things.

It's not perfected yet, but it works well enough to compose. The system itself is stable and many of my favorite programs run on it. A couple of days ago I figured out how to create a dual boot system for XP if I ever install XP. I wouldn't lose my Linux install. But unfortunately, I can't find a vendor of a fresh XP CD-ROM anymore. There was one on Amazon, but now it's gone. This sucks because XP activation still works.

Anyways, XP lives on within Wine on my Linux system. I tried Windows 7 and it seemed unreliable. I tried Windows 8 on a friend's computer and indeed it did look lame as hell with the McDonald's cash register look. That was a major turn off. If they change the whole main interface to look like non-functional annoying junk, what else are they capable of?

Today I found some webpages explaining how to tweak Linux for better audio support.
So the situation is pretty good now, and Linux/Wine/REAPER are only getting better.
I even learned how to install FL Studio from somebody's online tutorial.

hibidy · Post by **hibidy** » Mon Jul 07, 2014 9:49 pm

I just wish I knew why some things work for others, but not for "others"

win7 is so awesome and reliable with near zero issues. It's like sonar, I can't run it to save my life, but it's fine for so many

metamorphosis · Post by **metamorphosis** » Tue Jul 08, 2014 9:48 am

legendCNCD wrote: Nah, its common knowledge with fex. Adobe software (my work is graphics designer). Run couple of them with your data, minimize other down, work with the other, then bring up the previous one... gigantic swapping ensues. XP kernel memory management threw other task into swap while you were working with current task. This happens even when you have enough memory.

This does not happen on Vista or 7 or..

Interesting, though I've never worked with large enough graphics simultaneously for it to be a problem. And it could be the way the adobe software handles it's pagefile usage (yes, programs can control the pagefile themselves too). Most adobe software is fairly extensive in managing it's own cache, so I wouldn't be surprised if they also manage swapfile usage-
I've certainly never witnessed anything similar with DAW's, and usually mine're maxed out at the upper 2GB boundary.

xNiMiNx · Post by **xNiMiNx** » Wed Jul 09, 2014 6:28 pm

metamorphosis wrote:And it could be the way the adobe software handles it's pagefile usage (yes, programs can control the pagefile themselves too).

I dont know about how it handles it, but ive worked with a single 31gb (of 32) psd in ram and havent had issues on xp64. Maybe two copies running at once would be an issue, but different folks different strokes. Id rather load everything into a single project, and keep my groups/layers organized, for the things i do.

Zombie Queen · Post by **Zombie Queen** » Wed Jul 09, 2014 6:56 pm

legendCNCD wrote:Adobe software (my work is graphics designer). Run couple of them with your data, minimize other down, work with the other, then bring up the previous one... gigantic swapping ensues.

Which generation of Adobe? I'm working with this stuff on daily basis and never observed anything like this, however I stopped updating Adobe stuff quite a while ago too, so I'm at CS2, works alright, except Acrobat - Photoshop interaction which had been broken (it worked in earlier versions), I had to make it up by using macro scripts. As far I as checked, they didn't even fixed it yet. I worked a bit with newer CS pack, when I got some ready made files, I haven't seen any improvements, it all basically had the same functionality, except it worked at 1/4 speed. Bollocks. So if there are problems, I would blame Adobe.

hibidy · Post by **hibidy** » Wed Jul 09, 2014 8:00 pm

EDIT/ n/m, now it works

legendCNCD · Post by **legendCNCD** » Thu Jul 10, 2014 5:16 pm

What I mean, running big projects inside and exchanging around with Photoshop, Illustrator and Indesign all at once (yes I need to do it from time to time). I used back then CS4 versions on XP. I had same at home on Win7, identical hardware, except at work I had better GPU. 32bit and 4GB.
Difference was very much like night and day.
Running just Photoshop, no difference, except sometimes browser was thrown to swap on XP and when clicked back up, would take time.

xNiMiNx · Post by **xNiMiNx** » Thu Jul 10, 2014 9:24 pm

Zombie Queen wrote:Which generation of Adobe? I'm working with this stuff on daily basis and never observed anything like this, however I stopped updating Adobe stuff quite a while ago too, so I'm at CS2, works alright

Im sure different versions of CS would have some impact on the different experience, but It could be differences in XP too (dont know who uses stock xp, or tweaked, or how well (or bad), it was tweaked.

http://www.techbargains.com/hottips/hottip12/index.cfm

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Disable Paging Executive:
XP pages data from RAM memory to the hard drive. We can stop this happening and keep more data in RAM, resulting in better performance. Users with a large amount of RAM (256MB+) should use this setting. The setting we change to disable the 'Paging Executive', is DisablePagingExecutive. Changing the value of this key from 0 to 1 will de-activate memory paging. 

System Cache Boost: 
Changing the value of the key LargeSystemCache from 0 to 1 will tell XP to allocate all but 4MB of system memory to the file system cache, allowing the XP Kernel to run in memory. The 4MB of memory left is used for disk caching, if more is needed, XP allocates more. Generally, this tweak improves performance by a fair bit but can, in some intensive applications, degrade performance. As with the previous tweak, you should have at least 256MB of RAM before attempting to enable LargeSystemCache. 

Input/Output Performance: 
This improves performance of large file transfers. If this entry does not appear in the registry, you will have to create a REG_DWORD value called IoPageLockLimit. The data for this value is in number of bytes, and defaults to Zero which equates to 512KB on machines that have the value. Most people using this tweak have found maximum performance in the 8 to 16 megabyte range, so you will have to play around with the value to find the best performance. The value is measured in bytes, so if you want, 12MB allocated, it's 12 * 1024 * 1024, or 12582912. As with all these memory tweaks, you should only use this if you have 256MB or more of RAM.

metamorphosis · Post by **metamorphosis** » Thu Jul 10, 2014 10:52 pm

All OS's page stuff to the pagefile. That's why it's called the pagefile.
On the plus side, vista/win7/etc probably do have better algorithms for pagefile usage, on the neg side, they also use a shit-ton more ram to run optimally, although, by today's standards (8gb) the difference is less than what it used to be.

SalemBeatsKVR · Post by **SalemBeatsKVR** » Thu Jul 24, 2014 5:08 pm

Windows XP and its kernel were written in an era when single-core CPUs were the norm.

The hardware landscape has changed since then,
and I'll assert that the newer versions of Windows are able to make better use of modern hardware
simply by being designed with recent hardware advancements in mind.

Keep your XP computer for older projects, and upgrade to a newer OS when you buy a new system.

FWIW, I went from 98->XP->7->8->8.1. Skipped Vista (who didn't?).

-Ki
Salem Beats

metamorphosis · Post by **metamorphosis** » Fri Jul 25, 2014 2:16 am

Not really true,
hyperthreading was already a thing, as were multi-cpu systems-
and while it's true that win7 does a better job of core balancing on systems with greater than 2 cores, that is mitigated by it's overhead in terms of extra services/processes/etc.

SalemBeatsKVR · Post by **SalemBeatsKVR** » Fri Jul 25, 2014 4:09 am

metamorphosis wrote:Not really true,
hyperthreading was already a thing, as were multi-cpu systems-
and while it's true that win7 does a better job of core balancing on systems with greater than 2 cores, that is mitigated by it's overhead in terms of extra services/processes/etc.

Windows XP came out in 2001 (and obviously was in its planning and development stages even further back on the timeline).

Hyperthreading premiered in high-end Pentium 4 and Xeon chips the year following XP's release -- in 2002.

4 years after XP was introduced,
Intel rushed to beat AMD to be the first to offer dual-core desktop processors in 2005
with their Xeon and Pentium 4 Extreme Edition lineups.

Windows XP is truly a dinosaur.
If a person chooses to use it as the sole OS on a fresh install in 2014,
without needing to support a particular legacy application,
and when he has access to an OEM-bundled or cheap copy of a more modern version of Windows,
he is a victim of his habit of sticking to his familiar comfort zone.

More modern versions of the OS make much better use of modern hardware.
I have my own anecdotal evidence I can provide as support for this claim,
but if you'd like some highly quantifiable comparisons to look at, they're out there -- lots of benchmarks.
Windows XP was retrofitted to support new developments as they came to be,
but an aftermarket retrofit is never as efficient as something that's baked natively into the core.

-Ki
Salem Beats

metamorphosis · Post by **metamorphosis** » Thu Jul 31, 2014 7:43 am

That's not true, and the benchmarks show that.
But what I said was true, and you can take it or leave it.

hibidy · Post by **hibidy** » Thu Jul 31, 2014 7:53 am

No, I agree. It's a dinosaur. If you use it and like it, more power to ya.........but many of us have moved on to win7x64

metamorphosis · Post by **metamorphosis** » Thu Jul 31, 2014 7:54 am

Not really digging the emotional histrionics here.

Is everyone here done with Windows XP?