Non-dedicated DAW computer

Reilley

Reilley

New member
I'm buying a computer to record on in the next week or two, and it would make life easier if I could do it on one box; say, have 2 drives for the DAW stuff, and one for my other stuff; remove unnecessary and bothersome programmes; and when I use it to record, disable the modem, AV, and anything else necessary.

Does anyone here use that approach, or is that asking for trouble?

[Antec/Giagabyte-P35 system, Cubase & Reason.]

Thanks very much for any input.
 
Nowdays its not as black and white as it used to be. All of my rigs go on the net nowdays, IRC, web, even games

Just be smart about it
 
avoid using multithreaded apps like bittorrent or yahoo messenger when you record. they could slow down your DAW setup. If performance is still a problem you can easily kill the process by finding it in the Task Manager (or equivalent).


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because music is what you make it
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pipelineaudio said:
Just be smart about it
Click to expand...

Well, uh......... what did you have in mind?? [Being smart may not be easy for me.]

{{{{ ...IRC........ even games....... bittorrent or yahoo messenger........ }}}}

I don't use any of those.


Rather than ask 15 questions.... Is there a site which deals with what to disable, or how to set up a non-dedicated type DAW?

Dual boot........ So, if all the non-DAW stuff is on one drive, and you boot to the DAW drives, would that solve the whole problem? All the AV & other stuff would be out of the picture, yes? Hmm.. I'm not good on this stuff. Let's call the drives C [web], D, & E. If I boot to C, can I download stuff [VST, etc..] to the D & E?

Thanks again.
 
Back in the days of sub-1Ghz computers and Win98, you HAD to do this kind of stuff to get anything done.

Not today.

Don't go by 1950 car manuals to set up your 2008 car......

(None of my DAWs has EVER been single-use and I've NEVER had any problems.)
 
Provided this is a custom box and provided that you are using WinXP pro... the license issues may be different with Vista... build your box with a removable drive enclosure such as one of these.

Install both drives in their own tray, format both drives with your OS and drivers and plug in whichever one you are of a mind to use.
 
Dual boot means there's 2 bootable partitions with OS'es installed. When you boot, you're prompted which OS to boot to via a menu. You might have a bare XP install with ONLY your DAW stuff on one, and XP with your games, file sharing, IM's, etc on the other. It's just like swapping hard drives, without the actual swapping.. You can have have more than 2 bootable partitions if you want, ie. you could install linux on a 3rd, etc...
 
At the moment I dual boot to record so I have Vista/games/office stuff/IM etc on one partition and XP/Sonar on the other. Never had a problem.

Before I dual booted, I was running Sonar and all my recording software from the same partion as everything else. I left AV/Firewalls and even bittorrent running while I was recording and never had a problem.

With the kind of power in a decent modern rig, you're not likely to experience any slow down. Just install a firewall (comodo is good and free, or use the inbuilt Windows one) and an AV that doesn't use many resources (ie not norton. avast is a good free one, nod32 is the king of the paid variety) you should be fine.
 
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