Windows 11 - 24H2

[IvyBirds]

Because they enjoy it?

I enjoy killing things, that doesn't mean I go around indulging myself all the time.

And I don't build PCs all the time. But it is a hobby that I enjoy. Most importantly it allows me to customize the exact system I want for my other hobbies which are photography/videography and music

I can't get what I want off the shelf, so I make it

[osiris]

Just FYI there was an update yesterday (2/11) - seems to have fixed many issues. Still looking though because now all my NI stuff goes nuts graphically when I close them. No crashes, so maybe on NI end.

[Pictus]

And I don't build PCs all the time. But it is a hobby that I enjoy. Most importantly it allows me to customize the exact system I want for my other hobbies which are photography/videography and music

I can't get what I want off the shelf, so I make it

Same here, but I also did this as a job(former IT guy).

That's kind of my point - why does anyone need a computer to be "as powerful as possible" for music production in 2025? FFS, my one and only PC is 21cm x 13cm x 2cm. It runs our entire set-up, in the studio and on stage, and it rarely uses more than about one-quarter of the available CPU power to do it. A couple of years ago I was only running a Core i5 and even that rarely got above 75% CPU usage. And I'm talking about mobile processors here, which are considerably less powerful than desktop CPUs. But it's still way more than we need.

We produced our first two albums on PCs with single-core CPUs running at something like 800MHz. Sure, VSTi didn't sound as amazingly good in 2003 as they do now but they still got the job done. My teeny-tiny PC today has more than 40 times the CPU power of that machine, it exceeds my music production needs by four or five times. And it runs Blender 3D and After Effects amazingly well into the bargain, thanks to its serious GPU.

Your needs are not the same as others, are your PCs also quiet when doing 3D/video?
Anyway, I don't know any heavy AI/3D/video user who wouldn't want a faster/quieter PC.
Even when it comes to audio, I still see people wanting more capable and quieter PCs...

[mcbpete]

Your needs are not the same as others, are your PCs also quiet when doing 3D/video?
Anyway, I don't know any heavy AI/3D/video user who wouldn't want a faster/quieter PC.
Even when it comes to audio, I still see people wanting more capable and quieter PCs...

My laptop has 4 CPU/GPU performance settings quickly switchable from the desktop: (From 'slowest' to 'fastest' performance) Quiet, Power Saving, Entertainment, Performance. I leave it on Quiet for 90% of the time and it's completely silent, Entertainment when music making when the fan normally kicks in when I reach the mixing stage, and Performance when doing a file export (or video work)

Definitely seems the best option for me to leave it up to the user to choose quietness vs power at just the click of a button

[Pictus]

My laptop has 4 CPU/GPU performance settings quickly switchable from the desktop: (From 'slowest' to 'fastest' performance) Quiet, Power Saving, Entertainment, Performance. I leave it on Quiet for 90% of the time and it's completely silent, Entertainment when music making when the fan normally kicks in when I reach the mixing stage, and Performance when doing a file export (or video work)

Definitely seems the best option for me to leave it up to the user to choose quietness vs power at just the click of a button

It can be silent, but not silent and fast at the same time like a custom desktop can be when handling HEAVY work.
The noise level of your laptop will also depend on the ambient temperature, something
a custom desktop can be immune.

[Pictus]

...

[kperry]

How do you turn off Defender realtime scanning permanently?
I've been there and looks like all the suggestions don't work anymore.

Try https://www.sordum.org/9480/defender-control-v2-1/

Tamper Protection must be disabled before changing Group Policy settings, otherwise these are ignored.
- Open Windows Security (type Windows Security in the search box)
- Virus & threat protection > Virus & threat protection settings > Manage settings
- Switch Tamper Protection to Off

To permanently disable Microsoft Defender:
- Open Local Group Policy Editor (type gpedit.msc in the search box)
- Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Microsoft Defender Antivirus
- Enable Turn off Microsoft Defender Antivirus
- Restart the computer

This doesn't seem to work (Windows 10 Pro here - Tamper Protection is off, but the Policy doesn't "stick" and always comes back on. So I think there may be something else that is needed.

[BONES]

I can't get what I want off the shelf, so I make it

If you can't get exactly what you want off the shelf, you're just not looking hard enough or you are deliberately setting the bar impossibly high.

To put my comment back into context, I don't have any issues with Windows, ever, and the only reason I can think that might be is because I use standard, off-the-shelf hardware configurations. When I used to build my own PCs, that wasn't always the case. I want to make music, I very definitely do NOT want to spend my days f**king about trying to get my computer working or be afraid to update anything in case something breaks.

Your needs are not the same as others

Of course they f**king are, we're all making music.

are your PCs also quiet when doing 3D/video?

I wouldn't know, I'm too focussed on what I'm doing to notice and I almost always have loud music on anyway. I've covered this extensively before but I really don't get why anyone has this obsession with quiet computers. 25 years ago, sure, desktop PCs could be loud enough to be picked up by my vocal mic but we've been recording vocals for the last few weeks, in a fully treated TV studio, with my PC about 1m from the mic and you can't hear it in any of the recordings.

Anyway, I don't know any heavy AI/3D/video user who wouldn't want a faster/quieter PC.

AI runs in the cloud, not on your computer. I've been in the business for 30+ years and I have never, in all that time, known anyone to care about how quiet their workstation is. That said, in most of the workplaces I've plied my trade, the air-conditioning has been louder than anyone's computer, with the possible exceptions of the monster machines they use to run Flame. On start-up those things sound like a taxiing passenger jet but they settle down and I can't say I notice them when they are running.

Even when it comes to audio, I still see people wanting more capable and quieter PCs...

Yeah, because they are either clueless idiots with no idea what they are doing, too f**king lazy to make what they have work for them or they are mindless sheeple who had that attitude 25 years ago, when it made sense, and haven't noticed that it doesn't matter any more.

It can be silent, but not silent and fast at the same time like a custom desktop can be when handling HEAVY work.

Heavy work is rendering, whether it is audio, 3D or video. When you are actually working, you don't need that much power. A grunty GPU makes working in 3D a bit easier but for everything else I do, it just isn't that important any more.

OTOH, when you render, the application will leverage every bit of computing power it can find. e.g. My songs render at 4-5 times realtime most of the time but who gives a f**k if the fan is making a noise for that minute or two it takes? You can't do anything else while that's happening anyway. For 3d and motion graphics work, I don't really care if a project takes 2 hours to render or 8 hours; I put the render on before I go to bed and it's done when I get up, either way. I remember the first time I used global illumination in 3DS Max, in around 1999, and a 30 second animation took around 70 hours to render (in SD). Today, games do global illumination in 4k in realtime and 3D applications do it in the viewport as you work, even with low-power GPUs. It's more than ten years since I sought out the gruntiest machine I could find. These days form factor is my prime consideration, whichever CPU/GPU it comes with always gets the job done.

[IvyBirds]

I can't get what I want off the shelf, so I make it

If you can't get exactly what you want off the shelf, you're just not looking hard enough or you are deliberately setting the bar impossibly high.

Or maybe you are just looking to fight so you can get another suspension? You would think after getting suspended again you would try to follow the rules but I guess that's not in your nature

Screenshot_20250203-214356.jpg

In any case consumer PCs you buy off the shelf tend to be geared towards Video Gamers, or for general Office and Web Browsing Tasks

I don't have any need or interest in either of those since my primary purpose is Video and Photography editing and Music Production

While you can buy custom PCs built for such tasks, it far cheaper to just build your own

I wouldn't say my bar is set impossibly high, I just have needs that I can't get at my local Big Box or Office Store

One of the best parts of building your own PC is the clean install of Windows that you get without the bloatware you get when you buy an off the shelf PC.

[BONES]

Why would I care about getting suspended? I'll f**king well say what I think and if that offends anyone, they can go f**k themselves as far as I'm concerned. We're not children, we're f**king adults (I hesitate to say "grown-ups" as a lot of you seem to have the emotional maturity of Donald Trump). If you can't take a bit of criticism on the chin, if being told that something you have written makes you sound like a f**king moron, that's not my problem. It's just the truth and I see no reason to sugar-coat it.

I don't buy my computer primarily for music production, either, as it's not the hardest thing I make my computer do for me. The full-time professional video editors at work all have tiny HP Z2 Mini PCs running Avid Media Composer. Video editing is not hard for a modern computer and photo editing is an order of magnitude less hard than that. We do all the heavy lifting so we have much gruntier, full-size HP Z-Series workstations with dual Xeon processors, 128GB of RAM and serious nVidia Quadro GPUs. They cost the company around $9,000 each, which would probably be more like $12k for the likes of you or I. But do you know what? When I'm working, it doesn't feel one iota faster than my teeny-tiny Legion Go does. But it will render in a fraction of the time, which is important when you are working on our ridiculously tight deadlines.

That was the epiphany I had after we were targeted by Russian hackers the day before we aired a special on Putin's global poisoning campaign, when those machines were brand new, state of the art. For a few weeks we were asked to bring our own computers to work, as we're all allowed by the company to install Adobe CC on our own computers, and I realised that working on my laptop, connected to the monitors on my desk, felt exactly like working on the workstation, except that rendering was a lot slower. That's when I realised I didn't need to buy the latest, fastest CPUs or the biggest, gruntiest graphics cards, or fill every RAM slot with as much memory as I could cram in, that a consumer-level laptop with a decent spec was more than up to the task. And so it has proven to be in the five or six years since, across 7 or 8 different laptops, 2-in-1s and my current gaming handheld. I just let it all go because I could and now that I have found the perfect form-factor, I'll be sticking with the Legion Go for a while.

[Pictus]

AI runs in the cloud, not on your computer.

Wrong, for less demanding tasks, AI stuff can be done locally, search for the words Local AI.

I've been in the business for 30+ years and I have never, in all that time, known anyone to care about how quiet their workstation is.

My experience is different than yours.

[BONES]

And what business are you in that anyone should give any credence to your experience? The only people I've encountered who even think about how quiet or otherwise their computer is are Applytes and they only care because Apple tells them it matters.

[IvyBirds]

And what business are you in that anyone should give any credence to your experience? The only people I've encountered who even think about how quiet or otherwise their computer is are Applytes and they only care because Apple tells them it matters.

Wow tell us you have never been in a professional studio without telling us you have never been in a professional studio

[Pictus]

And what business are you in that anyone should give any credence to your experience? The only people I've encountered who even think about how quiet or otherwise their computer is are Applytes and they only care because Apple tells them it matters.

What credibility? We can write anything here!
Anyway, given the opportunity, most people prefer quieter things, not just the
PC, but the air conditioner, the refrigerator, the blender, the neighborhood, etc.
But exclude from the list the muscle cars.

BTW, a story...
I'm not from the film industry, but once a friend(also a nerd) asked for help, we had
to help a crew that was filming on a remote farm.
They had just acquired 4K cameras(Red One?), a novelty at the time, but the remote
infrastructure was not up to the task, the amount of data that 4K RAW produced was
brutal for the time. We had to build the PCs in a hurry with what was available at hand.
But just like in fairy tales, it had a happy ending.

[BONES]

Wow tell us you have never been in a professional studio without telling us you have never been in a professional studio

I was recording in professional studios long before there were computers in them but they became redundant, even before I got my own PC. It's been 30-odd years since I've had need of a professional studio.

... most people prefer quieter things, not just the PC, but the air conditioner, the refrigerator, the blender, the neighborhood, etc.

Speakers, too, I suppose? I know plenty of people who can't sleep if it's too quiet.

BTW, a story...
I'm not from the film industry, but once a friend(also a nerd) asked for help, we had
to help a crew that was filming on a remote farm.
They had just acquired 4K cameras(Red One?).

Film-makers like to shoot at high res because it gives them more options in edit but most content is finished in HD/2k and up-scaled as necessary.