Optimising Windows

  • Thread starter Thread starter Neil Ogilvie
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Neil Ogilvie

Still Learning.......
I have been told that there are things that can be turned off in Windows that optimise audio recording.
Could anyone point me toward a website that tells you how to do this?
 
Don't ever forget to back up your registry if you are gonna edit it!!!!!!!!
 
Windows 2000 IS the optimized version of Windows. No need to change anything on it right after install to have great performance for a DAW.

Ed
 
there are always optimizations available as no OS is designed specifically for audio, so they arrive with running services and applications that can be switched off to increase performance for your chosen application.

2000, XP Pro, 98 etc. not one of them was designed for a specific application, hence even in the business sector a large majority of OS's are modified to suite the environment....no different when setting up a daw.

you can leave it as is or you can optimise - dont shy away from it, turning off your screen saver or graphics is a form of optimization, there are just different levels of it.
 
Heh...I agree...

I just said that because it is the most prudent advise given to me from Slackmaster long ago. I didn't heed it and went on an "optimization" binge last year. Wound up hosing my perfectly good 2K install from all the "tweeks" that were supposed to make it run better. Not a single one of them made it run better at all! I reinstalled and just leave it alone.

Yes, I disable all Windows sounds, screen savers, desktop graphics, crap like that. But really, there is NOTHING else to do in 2K that is going to make a bit of difference. I have been using 2K since RC2 and it has been a wonderfully stable, well running OS the whole time. The only time it get's messed up is when I try to make it "better".

If one is running a 9X OS, well, there IS some good tweeks out there that can help it run a little more stable. But for 2K, just make sure you run it with at least 256MB of RAM and let it run whatever it wants at startup. It multitasks quite well, and gaining a few MB of RAM by diabling a couple of services is going to make NO difference in how it runs for audio.

Peace

Ed
 
Best tweak I ever used was building a second PC with the best of all parts lying around here, and only using it for audio.

I must admit using the opusaudioprojects.net and musicxp.net tweaks too, but I doubt if they make a big difference.
The highlights : I disabled almost all services as explained by BlackViper, disabled my pagefile (have 1Gb mem) + the usual (mostly visual) stuff.

Maybe it's no real "tweak", but to me it was also nice to add a fan-less vga card, a quiet PSU (enermax), silent cpu & northbridge cooler (zalman).

Herwig
 
all these things mentioned are tweaks of some kind no matter how insignificant they seem.

one thing to note is the more powerful your computer the less you have to do to get it running perfectly.

if your running Win XP/2000 on a P3 450 for example you'll notice the significance after a long list of tweaking alot more than someone running a 2Ghz P4 whose performance is already 3 or 4 times that of the P3...for both these machines not all tweaks listed on websites are relevant...the P4 will have far more overhead so you could leave the fancy graphics on and still run most audio apps with no problems or issues. try that on the P3 and you'll soon want to start disabling unused services and will also appreciate te tweak lists alot more....its all down to your setup.
 
I'll second Dead Poet about the Black Viper site. Most of the optimization steps he recomends are one's I had already heard of, but his site really lays them all out nicely. They're not designed for audio, just general speed up but reducing unnecesary OS bloat.
 
I installed Customizer XP v1.8.3. I followed the instructions and my audio performance is greatly enhanced. BTW I'm on XP.

cheers
John
 
decoy7 said:
if your running Win XP/2000 on a P3 450 for example you'll notice the significance after a long list of tweaking alot more than someone running a 2Ghz P4 whose performance is already 3 or 4 times that of the P3...
Click to expand...

?!?!?

What world do you live in?

There is not even a 100% perfomance increase when going from an older P3 to the newer P4's...
 
It depends what task you are doing.

I had a little example of raw PC speed today actually. I was downloading a new Windows XP software image (complete with Office XP and other apps, about 1.5 gig) onto two PCs, an older "generic" P2 400 and a new Dell P4 2 gig. Running from a DOS prompt connecting to a Novell server downloading compressed images. Same network cards, same server.

Even though I started the P2 quite a bit earlier, running the same task on the P4 finished long before the P2. I'd rough guess about 3-5 times faster. The big difference was the speed of the CPU decompressing the files onto the hard drive.

This is extreme; I agree that in day-to-day standard stuff, you will not notice that big of a difference. But XP is such a greedy pig that it's a good idea idea to throw all the CPU and RAM you can afford at it.

:p
 
brzilian said:

?!?!?
What world do you live in?
There is not even a 100% perfomance increase when going from an older P3 to the newer P4's...
Click to expand...


the overhead on a P4 Northwood compared to a 450 when running plugins in Logic is significant enough for me to say its more than a 100% performance increase.

i'm open to examples that say otherwise but i'm only speaking from personal experience both at home with daw's and at work with trader PC's.
 
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