KVR Audio

mcbpete · Post by **mcbpete** » Fri Oct 22, 2021 9:26 am

Used to get near daily BSODs on boot (just on boot, just before the log-on screen) on my new machine running Windows 10. But. BUT. I know it's 100% because of the absolute terrible Clevo system tuning/overclocking/underclocking/fan control system level drivers - as I managed to exorcise more and more from the system over the months (which is tricky as they're so tied up to the system) the BSODs on boot are maybe once a month, if that. But like I say, I KNOW what's causing it, it's not Windows itself - it's trying to function whilst being continually nudged in the backside by some drivers farted together by fairy dust!

Happy they've made the blue screen's now black in Win11 - faaar less stress inducing (and eye stress causing) than the light blue neon beast of Win8->10)

jamcat · Post by **jamcat** » Fri Oct 22, 2021 9:35 am

BONES wrote: ↑Fri Oct 22, 2021 8:38 am What has Microsoft ever taken out that anybody still needed? They just don't do that. You still get Internet Explorer and WMP, FFS. You can even still use Control Panel if you want to.

So you don’t remember the Windows 8 Start button fiasco?

Or the reputation Microsoft has rightly earned for biffing every other Windows version? You don’t remember Windows ME or Windows Vista? Or Windows 8? It was so bad they skipped Windows 9 just to get as far away from it as they could.

Microsoft has been completely rudderless and flailing ever since Bill Gates stepped aside. Much like Steinberg after Charlie retired.

Now the whole of Windows looks like one giant billboard. Microsoft has an adversarial relationship with their user base. They believe they have a captive audience and they’re going to force all their bad design decisions down our throats whether we like it or not. They screwed the pooch on mobile completely and they’ve been punishing their users for rejecting them ever since. “Oh, you didn’t like Windows phone? Well we’re going to turn your entire desktop into a giant Windows phone until you learn to love it.”

I used to be very pro-Windows and anti-Apple, too. But Microsoft has been doing everything wrong for a long time, while Apple has been doing everything right, and it all finally added up. You’ll come around eventually, too, just like you did with Cubase and Studio One.

I got a MacBook Pro because Apple hardware is superior, and fully planned on just running Windows on it. But every time I booted into Windows, I just felt like I had gone from playing with Transformers to GoBots.

The FINAL final straw for me is Windows 11 not installing on my PC DAW because it lacks TPM 2.0. When I next upgrade my DAW, it will be a Mac Pro.

hoxclab · Post by **hoxclab** » Fri Oct 22, 2021 12:09 pm

Hell naw I’m looking to get out of my Windows system as soon as possible. I get BSOD every time I fire up my laptop on my Thinkpad running Windows 10 Pro. This is entirely unacceptable. Half the time it doesn’t read my SSD and now my Bluetooth driver isn’t being recognized by Windows. I hate it.

BONES · Post by **BONES** » Sat Oct 23, 2021 1:16 am

So get it fixed. There is obviously something broken in it, that's behaviour I haven't encountered on any of the 18 Windows laptops I've owned or used in the last 20 years (I mostly buy a new one every year, while the old one is still a current model and worth something second-hand. It works out cheaper than keeping them for two or three years, when they become next to worthless. And 5 of the 18 were work machines supplied to me by my employer.)

jamcat wrote: ↑Fri Oct 22, 2021 9:35 amSo you don’t remember the Windows 8 Start button fiasco?

That hardly qualifies, as all the functionality of the button remained intact.

Or the reputation Microsoft has rightly earned for biffing every other Windows version?

You can't blame them for overestimating the intellect of their customers. The only version of Windows they really screwed was WinMe, which made everything worse. There was a bump in the road with Vista, exactly like every new version of macOS, but once everyone had updated drivers, Vista was a better OS than Win7, if only because WMP still worked properly. (They broke it in Win7, such that it wouldn't properly populate your music library, so that's one bug I can think of, at least.)

You don’t remember Windows ME or Windows Vista? Or Windows 8?

I don't need to remember Windows 8, I still use it. It's a great OS, much better for touch than Windows 10, which is why it is still installed on my 8" Yoga tablet. Win10 looks a lot neater but it doesn't actually work any better. If there was a problem with Win8, it was that customers weren't ready to take such a big leap forward, which is why Windows 10 pulled back so much. My ultimate version of Windows would be one that looked like Win10 but functioned like Win8 - full-screen Start with scrolling left-right instead of up-down. It all makes so much more sense if you take even a minute to think about it.

It was so bad they skipped Windows 9 just to get as far away from it as they could.

No, they skipped "9" because too many application installers identified Windows versions by a single digit, so they wouldn't have been able to tell the difference between Windows 9 and Windows 95/98, and so might have installed the wrong version of a driver or application. It was a Y2k type situation.

Now the whole of Windows looks like one giant billboard. Microsoft has an adversarial relationship with their user base. They believe they have a captive audience and they’re going to force all their bad design decisions down our throats whether we like it or not.

Yeah, because that's worked so badly for Apple, right? But it's also not even remotely true. If it interests you, you should read the Windows blogs, where they go into a lot of detail about what drives their design decisions. It's pretty much all based on how they interpret the billions of keystrokes they collect from users. e.g. The whole Start redesign in Win8 grew from their study of usage of the Start Menu, which they saw had dropped by as much as 80% between XP and Win7 for some tasks. It's a very, very open process that anyone is welcome to scrutinise. As a designer, I was fascinated by the depth they went into when it came to explaining the Metro design language, which they then threw out after about two years.

The problem is that when you look at a billion anonymous keystrokes, you end up with a very average result because most of their users are going to be clueless idiots. I guarantee that's what Win11 is all about - dumbing it down for the lowest common denominator.

They screwed the pooch on mobile completely and they’ve been punishing their users for rejecting them ever since. “Oh, you didn’t like Windows phone? Well we’re going to turn your entire desktop into a giant Windows phone until you learn to love it.”

Which is what Windows 10 is. The Settings app in Windows 10 is EXACTLY the same as the Settings app in Windows 10 Mobile. If you arrange the window to the same proportions, it looks identical. And Windows Phone/Windows Mobile was so much better than Android and even better than iOS. I had WinPhones from 2011 until 2018 and it was hilarious to watch iOS and Android shouting from the rooftops about amazing new features that had been in Windows Phone for years. Their only failure in mobile was the same as all their other failures - they are absolutely shit at selling themselves and their products. e.g. They had a streaming music service in 2009, years before anyone had even heard of Spotify, and it was a better service, too - for $7.99 a month you got unlimited streaming and you also got to download 10 tracks to keep. And their catalogue was as big as iTunes. If they had been able to market it, they could have owned streaming music but they are hopeless and quietly killed it off when it got too hard.

I used to be very pro-Windows and anti-Apple, too. But Microsoft has been doing everything wrong for a long time, while Apple has been doing everything right, and it all finally added up. You’ll come around eventually, too, just like you did with Cubase and Studio One.

Are you f**king nuts!?! All those things you say Microsoft is doing wrong are things they've copied from Apple, who've been doing it for decades. e.g. What Microsoft did with Vista is exactly what Apple do every second new version of macOS - change things that break backwards-compatibility, like deciding to remove all support for 32 bit applications, just to save money on development costs and to hell with their users. You've jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire, my friend.

I got a MacBook Pro because Apple hardware is superior,

This is so provably wrong that it just makes you look like a complete fool. Until they started putting their own M1 chips into their laptops, they relied on exactly the same components, from exactly the same vendors, as everyone else - Intel for their CPUs, Thunderbolt/USB busses and networking hardware, AMD for their graphics cards and the same vendors as everyone else for memory and storage. Their laptops very likely even get put together in the same factories. So now, on some machines, they have a point of difference with their CPU/GPUs but the rest of their components will be exactly the same as everyone else's.

The FINAL final straw for me is Windows 11 not installing on my PC DAW because it lacks TPM 2.0. When I next upgrade my DAW, it will be a Mac Pro.

Better start saving, those things cost more than a good, low mileage used car, for absolutely no reason.

jamcat · Post by **jamcat** » Sat Oct 23, 2021 1:40 am

Apple hardware is superior when it comes to displays, thermal design and noise, materials, and general build quality. You can see it, feel it, and hear it (or not hear it.) A MacBook Pro is just a nicer artifact to own than a plastic Windows laptop.

Mac Pros don't have to cost as much as a car, though they do come with wheels. Much of what jacks up the cost are optional components that are totally irrelevant to audio. And with Apple making their own CPUs, the Apple Silicon Mac Pro is going to be considerably cheaper than the current Intel iterations, as is the case with their M1 laptops. Take into consideration their generous trade-in policy and educational discounts, and they become pretty reasonable for that level of performance. Get an additional 6% off for purchasing with an Apple Card, and split it up over interest free payments over a year. In the end, buying a new Mac is actually more practical and affordable than a new Windows machine in many cases.

BONES · Post by **BONES** » Sat Oct 23, 2021 7:20 am

jamcat wrote: ↑Sat Oct 23, 2021 1:40 amApple hardware is superior when it comes to displays, thermal design and noise, materials, and general build quality. You can see it, feel it, and hear it (or not hear it.)

But one thing you definitely can't do is prove it. Or you would. I'd also suggest that all of those things are largely irrelevant, certainly to me. And you're wrong. I'll give you one excellent example - materials. Apple seem obsessed with using metal for everything and covering their phones with glass, two materials that damage far more easily than practical materials like plastic. I'd take a plastic phone over a metal one every time and I also prefer plastic in my laptop to metal, for the same reasons. With a metal laptop lid, for example, scratches are really obvious, where on a plastic laptop lid, they may be obvious when they happen but over time they almost seem to heal themselves and became far less obvious. Plastic got a bad reputation in the 50s and 60s because it was crude and basic. Modern plastics are infinitely superior materials for almost anything, yet Apple sticks with antiquated metals and glass.

As for displays, they are made by the same companies as everyone else's. Apple may have their own specs but the panels come out of the same factories. Apple haven't even bothered with OLED screens yet, have they? OTOH, they've been available for PCs for years now and are universally preferred. And all their laptops still only have one screen, where innovators like Asus have a range of second-gen dual screen laptops that even include models with an OLED screen. I mean, seriously, what does Apple have to compete with one of these bad boys?

A MacBook Pro is just a nicer artifact to own than a plastic Windows laptop.

Really? Which of these do you think looks better?

or

Because I have to say, I saw a new Surface Laptop 4 in black today and it is far and away the most incredible looking laptop I have ever seen. It's stunning. I wouldn't have one, though, because it's metal and it would scratch too easily, which would make me cry. OTOH, the new MB Pro looks a bit horrible, even before you notice the camera notch. Seriously, look at the edges of the base, it just looks wrong, like something from the 1990s.

Mac Pros don't have to cost as much as a car, though they do come with wheels.

No, the base price in Australia is Au$10,000 and all you get for that is a lowly 256GB SSD. Want 2TB of storage, which seems reasonable to me, add Au$1200, which does not seem reasonable at all. See for yourself. For the same money you could have a low mileage Ford Focus in really good condition.

Take into consideration their generous trade-in policy and educational discounts, and they become pretty reasonable for that level of performance. Get an additional 6% off for purchasing with an Apple Card, and split it up over interest free payments over a year. In the end, buying a new Mac is actually more practical and affordable than a new Windows machine in many cases.

As opposed to walk into your local big box store, choose the PC you want and ask the guy for a good price. I guarantee he'll take off a minimum of 20% (unless it's a Surface). Then sign up for 60 months interest free and you won't even notice the tiny repayments coming out of your bank account every week or month. It's like a brand new computer for free!

So here's your challenge - find a better deal on a new Mac than I got on my last new PC laptop. Your specs are 10th Gen Intel Core i7 (6 cores, not 4), 32GB RAM, 4GB graphics (I won't discount the fact that you will have to go with inferior Radeon graphics) and 1.5TB of SSD storage. I paid $1380 for mine originally, then an extra $480 to get it up to that spec without voiding the next day, on site warranty. So that's Au$1860, which is about US$1390. Let's call it US$1400 to be sporting. Your time starts... NOW!

starflakeprj · Post by **starflakeprj** » Sat Oct 23, 2021 8:30 am

jamcat wrote: ↑Sat Oct 23, 2021 1:40 am Apple hardware is superior when it comes to displays, thermal design and noise, materials, and general build quality. You can see it, feel it, and hear it (or not hear it.) A MacBook Pro is just a nicer artifact to own than a plastic Windows laptop.

Tell that to my MacBook Pro which has asthma.

chk071 · Post by **chk071** » Sat Oct 23, 2021 9:42 am

jamcat wrote: ↑Fri Oct 22, 2021 9:35 am So you don’t remember the Windows 8 Start button fiasco?

Start button fiasco? What was wrong with the start button?

Windows 8 was Microsoft's attempt to hop on the tablet hype. Which didn't work, also because tablets went more and more unpopular. Their mobile phone OS didn't work either. Like a lot of stuff Google and Apple did, which didn't work. Look where they are now. Microsoft overtook Apple as the world's most valuable company for a short time. They're doing great.

DaveClark · Post by **DaveClark** » Thu Oct 28, 2021 3:56 pm

jamcat wrote: ↑Sat Oct 23, 2021 1:40 am And with Apple making their own CPUs, the Apple Silicon Mac Pro is going to be considerably cheaper than the current Intel iterations, as is the case with their M1 laptops.

Although this may not matter to most folks, I used to work in the semiconductor industry so differentiate between those who only design stuff, those who only make stuff, and those who do both.

Apple allegedly designed M1. TSMC makes M1.

I say "allegedly" because I don't know exactly who the M1 designers were, whether or not they were under contract rather than Apple employees, or whatever.

Once upon a time, Apple was in great fear of vertically integrated companies who did it all because of these companies' assumed reduced cost. What they didn't take into account for some time was that most vertically integrated companies have weak links in their chain and/or in their marketing, etc.

Aloysius · Post by **Aloysius** » Thu Oct 28, 2021 5:52 pm

Where would one get Windows 11?

blobe · Post by **blobe** » Mon Nov 08, 2021 1:48 am

i'd say for now no, unless theres a new feature youre looking for in it!

kritikon · Post by **kritikon** » Sat Nov 13, 2021 4:53 am

Sounds like no point in me getting it then. I can wait. Have to say that the usual Mac/PC crap that crept in here is just that - crap. Can't remember the last time I saw a BSOD - certainly not in the 2010s, and way back into the 2000s - and that would have been on a Win7 machine. Haven't felt the need for extra go-faster/cleaner gizmos for many a year - been very happy with the included Win cleaners/optimizers/go-fasterizers. I never understood that Apple obsessed fanboy thing "Macs just work" thing - for the last 10 years at least, I open up a Win machine and it just works too. They both just work, get over it.

"Apple hardware is superior when it comes to displays, thermal design and noise, materials, and general build quality. You can see it, feel it, and hear it (or not hear it.) A MacBook Pro is just a nicer artifact to own than a plastic Windows laptop."

Sounds like you need to go do some yoga, paint your eyebrows, twiddle your chakras or other woo to connect you with the etherverse. Apple just charge more. Even that is becoming not so true though - the price of some of the MS h/w is pretty astounding IMO. I think they've finally cottoned onto the marketing magic that a huge price makes many people think it's better quality. Sometimes true, very often not, but it pays - no doubt about it. I'm not stupid enough to pay double the price for either a Mac or some of the MS stuff when lots of evidence of ownership has proved to me that I get what I want and power I need from HP/Dell and god knows how many others. If I have specific niche needs, that may well not be true, but as a musician - it's bullshit. Any old PC/laptop does the job as long as you get enough RAM and a decent enough CPU with good drives. If they build it out of turtle shell or wormskin is irrelevant. They can get their shaman to chant a magical feng shui spell on it and it makes no difference to me. Good for you if you want to pay extra for that placebo - just be aware it's placebo.

Anyway - doesn't sound like Win11 offers me anything currently. Sounds a bit like they want to make it more like a phone - I don't like phones particularly and mostly avoid the obsession with living life on a mobile, so...not for me I guess. As long as they don't make it compulsory to have touchscreen I don't mind.

Gadget Fiend · Post by **Gadget Fiend** » Sun Nov 14, 2021 12:09 pm

BONES wrote: ↑Sat Oct 23, 2021 1:16 am I don't need to remember Windows 8, I still use it. It's a great OS, much better for touch than Windows 10, which is why it is still installed on my 8" Yoga tablet.

Windows 8 was an absolute abomination. Microsoft tried to cram their craptastic Windows Phone OS onto desktop users to disastrous effects. The fullscreen Start Menu in Windows 8 with its invisible "smart" corners was an absolute clusterf$ck. It was maybe the worst UI/usability blunder of All TIME.

Windows 11 FINALLY corrects that POS. If people are asking whether they should upgrade to Windows 11, the answer is YES! The usability improvement are worth every penny. (Wait, Windows 11 is a FREE upgrade from Windows 10.)

Gadget Fiend · Post by **Gadget Fiend** » Sun Nov 14, 2021 12:24 pm

kritikon wrote: ↑Sat Nov 13, 2021 4:53 am Apple hardware is superior when it comes to displays, thermal design and noise, materials, and general build quality. You can see it, feel it, and hear it (or not hear it.) A MacBook Pro is just a nicer artifact to own than a plastic Windows laptop.

This is all true to anyone who has sat down and used a MacBook Pro. There are NO PC laptops that come close to matching the build quality of a MacBook Pro. The closest contender is a Dell XPS. But even these "high end" Dells have crappy keyboards, fewer Thunderbolt ports, lower quality webcams, uglier enclosures, and WAY louder fan noise.

If you want a premium laptop, buy a Mac - especially one of the new M1 Pro and M1 Max laptops that have the best laptop displays, the highest performance per watt, the best keyboard and trackpad, and look absolutely beautiful.

fedexnman · Post by **fedexnman** » Sun Nov 14, 2021 12:32 pm

Outside of just us audio users , gamers are not happy with Windows 11 .. it's the same crap show that was Windows 8 . I think there is startdock and all these 3rd party folks trying to fix the UI again . To be quite frank . iOS15 is garbage as well . It's the most in user friendly p.o.s. out there . On my wife's iPhone12 you have to press volume up , down , then hold the power button down the swipe the power off on the screen to shut off and reboot . What is this Nintendo let's get max lives to play through Contra ? Who thinks this crap up .... So to Apple , Google , Microsoft , and big Tech . Hey nerds slow down a bit .

Any point in me getting Win11?