The good thing with nowadays computers is that you can use like almost any stock model to do music on it. Computers have improved, the OS has improved, drivers have improved.
Whenever I tweak a machine the first thing I look at is security (both in terms of internet security and data security - I'd hardly ever use a machine without partitions, usually I allways add another physical drive as well).
After that I apply some tweaks to enhance "responsiveness" (the tweakxp ones for instance).
After that I just use thíngs.
Whenever I come to a point I may need more performance I may have a look about which further tweakings might be useful.
But very often I find buying another 256/512MB of RAM to be pretty much more efficient instead of disabling this or that.
For instance: My current Windows XP install (on the music machine that is) loads with 100MB - and while I *may* even try to get that down to something less, it just takes me 10 minutes to head over to some PC shop, buy another 512MB of RAM (for, dunno, 50-70 Euro or so) and experience a LOT of a difference - instead of fooling around with some tweaks which would result in 50 more useable MB at best.
Yes, this has been WAY different in the past.
Back in my P200 MMX days (the first machine I did serious audio recordings on) I had like 64 or 128 MB of RAM and saving another 5-10 of those made a HUGE difference in terms of performance.
These days I can almost ignore such things.
Large samples are streaming from disk, for smaller ones I got more than enough memory anyways.
Almost the same goes for CPU useage. You may gain 20% or so on a CPU <1GHz, but with anything 2GHz and up this might become a moot point again. At least for me it is.
I can use my time more efficiently I think (by posting senseless things @ K-v-R for instance).
Optimising XP for audio.
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- KVRAF
- 13446 posts since 14 Nov, 2000 from Hannover / Germany
There are 3 kinds of people:
Those who can do maths and those who can't.
Those who can do maths and those who can't.
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- KVRAF
- 3002 posts since 24 Nov, 2003 from Heidelberg&Hamburg
There was an article in Future music, 150 or 151 (I think 
). They seemed to understand both opinions here too, as they stated rather what Sascha said here, and then gave advice for some tweaking.
Personally I put out what is unimportant (and always like to know what is unimportant concerning music) and clear my registry from time to time with jv16 or some tool. Then someone at rgcaudio-forum (giving advice how to use sfz+ best) talked about defragmenting RAM, don't know if those programs are necessary though? And defrag your hard drive surely. For the laptop I'll surely try out websites you mentioned here
.
But I had toooo many discussions about things like "take only one partition" (my PC-selling man) or "take 4 at least" or "buy another hard drive" or "don't buy another hard drive today as harddisks are 80GB or even 160" and so on, and it used to make me tired, at the end of the day after some months only 80 unfinished song-parts being on my machine which crashed all the same due to another problem (too boring to tell here)
.
cheers to all,
Georg
). They seemed to understand both opinions here too, as they stated rather what Sascha said here, and then gave advice for some tweaking. Personally I put out what is unimportant (and always like to know what is unimportant concerning music) and clear my registry from time to time with jv16 or some tool. Then someone at rgcaudio-forum (giving advice how to use sfz+ best) talked about defragmenting RAM, don't know if those programs are necessary though? And defrag your hard drive surely. For the laptop I'll surely try out websites you mentioned here
.But I had toooo many discussions about things like "take only one partition" (my PC-selling man) or "take 4 at least" or "buy another hard drive" or "don't buy another hard drive today as harddisks are 80GB or even 160" and so on, and it used to make me tired, at the end of the day after some months only 80 unfinished song-parts being on my machine which crashed all the same due to another problem (too boring to tell here)
.cheers to all,
Georg
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- Banned
- 22457 posts since 5 Sep, 2001
[DELETED]
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- KVRAF
- 1907 posts since 29 Oct, 2003
litepc is very good.
http://beyondconvention.net/ohussain/lsinstaller/
litestep is good.
opera browser w/o java is unbeatable in fullscreen mode.
experts say mandrake linux is dead easy for internet/downloading/registering/in dual boot
http://beyondconvention.net/ohussain/lsinstaller/
litestep is good.
opera browser w/o java is unbeatable in fullscreen mode.
experts say mandrake linux is dead easy for internet/downloading/registering/in dual boot