I got a new laptop recently - Acer Aspire 5684WMLi - 1.83Ghz Core Duo, 2Gb, GeForce Go 7600 128Mb, Vista, and its running lovely. The only thing I've switched off is the minimise/maximise animations, but Aero runs fine either way. There's still a shed load of stuff running - uses around 600Mb RAM when booted and I was hoping there was some software that would allow me to chooe what services and programs loaded at startup and allowed me to save this and other configurations with an option to choose which configuration to use on bootup. The machine's fine with all this stuff running when doing normal office/internet stuff, but I'd like to be able to strip it right down when using it for music - but I don't want to have to do it all manually. I know you can configure multiple hardware profiles and choose for each whether a service runs at start up or not, but there's 144 services to go through (and i don't know of a way to tie startup programs to profiles either). I'd just like a menu drived app to do this all for me.
On another note, my Windows Experience Index score is 3.1 (out of 5) broken down as follows:
Processor - 4.8
RAM - 4.6
Graphics (for Aero) - 3.1
Gaming graphics - 3.6
Hard disk - 4.7
The main index is based on the lowest score of the above.
Well, as I've said, Aero runs fine, so I don't know what benefit you'd get in Vista with a higher score for Aero graphic capability.
What is interesting is that the graphic card scores higher for gaming - so what Microsoft are actually saying is that you need more graphics resources to run Aero that for gaming!!!
Vista is lovely to use (jury's still out on performance/security etc.). Not sure about DAW usage yet - FL seems to run ok apart from a few problems - such as the splash screen not disappearing, some plugs not Vista compatible, and I've had Vista's audio engine die a couple of time after an FL crash - had to reboot. (Using ASIO4ALL btw).
Windows boot manager application
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- KVRian
- 1258 posts since 25 Nov, 2003 from London
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- KVRAF
- 37490 posts since 14 Sep, 2002 from In teh net
I was thinking about doing this and having a stripped down boot for Audio and a fancier one for mainstream and office stuff - was wondering do you really need two separate installs of OS's or would separate profiles be enough? (can a profile have per user settings for services though?)
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- KVRian
- Topic Starter
- 1258 posts since 25 Nov, 2003 from London
In XP and earlier, you could have multiple hardware profiles that you choose from on boot up - didn't matter what user you then logged on as.
From a quick Google search, it looks like they've removed the ability to create your own hardware profiles in Vista - apparently it creates them automatically on demand or something - I've got a single profile - "Undocked Profile", but god knows how or if I can create my own, so I'm stumped.
Also been having a quick look at the registry and there's just a flag to say whether a service starts or not, so I'd guess it wouldn't be too hard to knock up an app to query your service list, presented a tick box next to each, and allowed you to save and load configurations. Not sure whether the boot process could be interrupted to allow you to choose, so you might have to boot up, then select a configuration before rebooting into it.
I thought I'd read ages ago that Vista would have a performance "button" that shutdown everything you didn't need for gaming.
From a quick Google search, it looks like they've removed the ability to create your own hardware profiles in Vista - apparently it creates them automatically on demand or something - I've got a single profile - "Undocked Profile", but god knows how or if I can create my own, so I'm stumped.
Also been having a quick look at the registry and there's just a flag to say whether a service starts or not, so I'd guess it wouldn't be too hard to knock up an app to query your service list, presented a tick box next to each, and allowed you to save and load configurations. Not sure whether the boot process could be interrupted to allow you to choose, so you might have to boot up, then select a configuration before rebooting into it.
I thought I'd read ages ago that Vista would have a performance "button" that shutdown everything you didn't need for gaming.